“My parents never locked the house doors at night when I was a child. There was no need to.” It’s a line Southerners of a certain age will reach for when they’re disparaging How It’s All Turned Out. The anecdote’s intended to show how decent and gentle the Earth was once, before the present, inferior […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
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It’s a family show. Leave the kids home.
We could call it regional theater’s own strange little version of the family protection act–the group of cautionary domestic dramas that have blanketed the area at the close of the spring season. But with due respect to Tolstoy, not only are all happy family shows alike; after a while, the unhappy ones start to sound […]
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Political satire: Short form and long
The political humor was so caustic, so on target and so condensed in Leggett Theater Thursday night. But then Bright Eyes’ incendiary “Protest Song” ended during the intermission of Burning Coal’s Accidental Death of an Dnarchist at Peace College, and we reluctantly returned to the same predicament we’d left in act one. Actually, I’m tempted […]
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The Gospel as preached on North Duke Street
Then said the Lord, Doest thou well to be angry? Jonah 4:4, King James Version, Holy Bible The controversy, by now, is familiar. It follows the stage play The Laramie Project wherever it goes, in incendiary press releases, invariably from Topeka, Kan., to the local media. Two weeks ago it was Durham’s turn. “WBC to […]
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in isolation chambers
A host of early 20th-century writers documented how “difficult” women were once routinely “put away.” But Archipelago Theatre’s new play, The Woman in the Attic, uses a crisis in a long-term marriage to explore through metaphor how the creative, the nurturing and the possible within us becomes estranged–and what happens to our relationships with the […]
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in anarchy
Remember A Mouthfulla Sacco & Vanzetti, Shakespeare & Originals’ 2000 slapstick revision of the infamous anarchist trial? Burning Coal Theatre returns to similar grounds–and methods–in Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, opening this weekend at Peace College’s Leggett Theater. Fo’s improbable comedy examines the Italian police’s culpability in the “accidental” death of […]
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in Texas double-wides
“White-trash Gothic with a comic-book spin, a sort of Tobacco Road according to Wes Craven,” said the Wall Street Journal. “Cynical, sick, exploitive and gross,” yowled the London Daily Telegraph, “but schlock horror doesn’t come funnier or more compelling than this.” They’re describing Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe, a darker-than-dark comedy about the Smiths, a troubled […]
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Down, home: Scripts in rags and coal dust
Deeply ambivalent about the folks down home? You’re not alone: So is the theater. In the last two weeks, major regional and collegiate shows have greeted the people, the places, the history–and even in a couple of instances, the present–back home with everything from curatorial reverence to a dead bead with a loaded gun. Productions […]
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Evil moves, evanescent memories
If David Lynch needs a choreographer–or an evil lighting designer, for that matter–I have just the men in mind: Jack Arnold and David Ferri. They’re the pair responsible for Missing Tenderness, a work that must be considered an early contender for the Most Understated Dance Title of the year. Its premiere proved one of the […]
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The compactor of critique
This week’s assignment: five shows, at the height of the season. Volley for serve: 1. Hannah Blevins calls them “America’s third world”: the close-knit coal-mining communities of southwest Virginia she’s been researching and conducting interviews in during the past two years. She now reports that things have changed radically since the days of “Coal Miner’s […]