Byron Woods

When a show’s this unsuccessful, I’m usually not back the second night to buy a copy of the soundtrack. But well before sunset the day after viewing THE END OF CINEMATICS, I’d realized the insidious polyrhythms of composer Mikel Rouse’s pop-song score had burrowed their way into my psyche. In such cases, the best way […]

Start with Justice Theater Project’s May 2004 production of A Lesson Before Dying. Add Nixon’s Nixon, which ran at Manbites Dog Theater three months later. Include Playmakers Repertory Company’s Yellowman, which bowed in March of the following year. Then wait 15 months for the 10-minute play Holy Hell, which capped the ArtsCenter’s 2006 Ten by […]

She casts on the water the breadcrumbs that represent the sins of the old year at the end of Tashlik, a Jewish ritual of regrets–then the woman throws herself into the river. Decades before, on a foreign battlefield, six soldiers who have already made the ultimate sacrifice for their country reevaluate the exchange–and come climbing […]

Author Neil Gaiman has entertainingly pointed out the degrees to which language links the lesser extremities of human experience with the final extremity: our own mortality. The briefest of inventories here–phrases like “bored to death,” “killer material,” or “it’s to die for”–should prove the point. The words mock our tendency to exaggerate. They also try […]

Just how badly does the world need another gathering like the RadiCackaLacky Puppetry Convergence? Consider the following quote from Charles Isherwood’s lead New York Times theater essay that ran Sunday, Sept. 3–the same day the five-day radical puppetry conference and festival wrapped up in Chapel Hill: Can art save the day? More specifically, can theater […]

It was a moment of serendipity perhaps specific to the performing arts. By chance, a Chicago actor heard a woman’s voice, in passing, on the radio–an interview with a public school teacher she was about to portray on stage. But the moment changed Cheryl Lynn Bruce’s understanding of her character, Helen Sclair, and her insight […]

Even without the scheduled appearance of playwright Austin Pendleton at a benefit performance for the company this week, Orson’s Shadow was still a daunting choice as the opening production of Deep Dish Theater’s new season. Last week we compared this potent backstage drama to Russell Lees’ political comedy Nixon’s Nixon, which Manbites Dog Theater triumphed […]

It’s safe to say the region has seen nothing like it. Call it a small invasion, since by Sunday night more than 60 theater artists and musicians, representing 20 groups stretching from Washington to Maine and into Canada, will present about 30 different works in showcases across Carrboro and Chapel Hill. They will use everything […]

Don’t let the title of Deep Dish Theater’s season opener throw you. The millionaire playboy and spectral vigilante of old-time radio serials is nowhere to be found in Orson’s Shadow. But even if the fictive character of Lamont Cranston doesn’t make an appearance, this biographical backstage drama about a clash between Orson Welles and Laurence […]