Awards have always made me itch. It isn’t just the rented tux. You go. You can’t relax during dinner, not with a treacherous entrée springing for the chance to accompany you–on your shirt, tie or lapel–on your trip to the microphone. And what do you say when you get there? “Thanks, folks: I am the […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inNews
Surrealpolitik
It had been a difficult day at the arts conference. Late on a May afternoon in a dark-paneled bar in Los Angeles, a fellow correspondent thoughfully gazed into his highball glass before asking, in lofty tones, “Is a theater critic a newspaperman?” Almost immediately, the sage to his right archly replied, “Is a barnacle a […]
Posted inNews
in human game pieces
At the start of piece~meal, the new original play by both hands theatre company, a septet of 20- and 30-somethings haven’t realized yet that they’re reducing one another to mere tokens of themselves–the “pieces” of the show’s title. More than one will want the piece of themselves they gave another character back before the evening’s […]
Posted inNews
The Cradle still rocks
In all of the history of the theater, there’s never been an opening night to match June 16, 1937. That was the night Marc Blitzstein’s musical, The Cradle Will Rock, opened in New York–an hour late, and in a theater 20 blocks away from the one originally scheduled. When it finally began, the performance took […]
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in women’s bodies
Two weeks after talking with a woman who had a debilitating cosmetic procedure performed on her vagina at a California “laser rejuvenation center,” EVE ENSLER was in Africa, interviewing a 78-year-old woman trying to end female genital mutilation. In THE GOOD BODY, her funny, poignant and healing first one-woman show after The Vagina Monologues, Ensler […]
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When a woman smiles…
“Never trust a man who can’t stop grinning,” my Aunt Jetty said. But does the same rubric apply to women too? For the grins are similar–indeed, they no doubt are related–on the faces of two characters in different productions in the region this week. The smile on Diane Ciesla’s face in the opening moments of […]
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In this carnival
Though Jan Chamber’s post-apocalyptic circus set for Duke Theater Studies’ The Trojan Women is an achievement in recycled rubber, rent canvas, snapped timbers and ash, I’m reasonably certain director Ellen Hemphill didn’t intend for me to see the set of syndicated dish/rag shows like Access Hollywood, Extra or E! superimposed upon its upper chamber. No […]
Posted inArt
Radical listening, radical touch
Two men sit across from each other on an otherwise empty stage. Half a globe, half a world, rests on the floor halfway between themand since the two are just now a world apart, the stage image is telling, appropriate. The older man on the right says, “I thought everyone was being heard.” After a […]
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Suspicion ourselves
Until the regional communities of conscience unite with our theater contingent to stage graphic public demonstrations–recitals, let’s call them–of “expanded interrogation techniques” already documented as used against government-identified “enemy combatants,” we have to settle for the next best thing: the current production of Back of the Throat at Manbites Dog Theater. God, how I hate […]
Posted inArt
Moving from the balcony to UNC’s center stage
Why is Jane Comfort particularly pleased about her company’s Friday night concert in UNC’s Memorial Hall? Call it the principle of returning. This, after all, was the room where she first realized she was going to make a life for herself in dance. “It was right there,” the choreographer recalls. “I was sitting in the […]
