It’s a rubric of theater criticism and something of a gentle reminder: Every show has its individual strength; each play has its unique problem. To be sure, there were strengths on display during this year’s iteration of 10 by 10, Carrboro ArtsCenter’s 10-minute play festival. But the same difficulties kept cropping up far too often […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inNews
The ecru revolution?
I would love to believe future workplaces will resemble the postmodern playgrounds Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross have cataloged in their current book, The 21st Century Office. Its full-color photographs disclose “fun” environments like the chrome swings in Another.com’s London reception area, high-concept movie sets like the silver and maple board room of Berlin’s DZ […]
Posted inNews
in ten minutes
Ten-minute theater is a strictly take-no-prisoners affair. And if it looks easy, you try jamming an introduction, exposition, complication, crisis, climax and denouement–plus a decent punch line or two–into 600 seconds or less. For the third year, Lynden Harris and company have culled 400 submissions from around the world into a summer evening’s theatrical dim […]
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Sweeping statements
Okay, let’s not get too excited. After all, Tamara Kissane and Cheryl Chamblee didn’t invent the hybrid theatrical, literary and rhythmic form that two enthusiastic, beyond-capacity audiences witnessed during both hands theatre company’s staged reading of brooms: a play about saying yes, last weekend at Manbites Dog Theater. Sooner or later, any poet worth her […]
Posted inArt
The church of inconvenient questions
The morning after Ronald K. Brown’s company, EVIDENCE, closed a concert of dance works including Grace, Come Ye, and the world premiere of Redemption at Page Auditorium, the Sunday New York Times featured an article on Russian conceptualist Alex Melamid’s “Art Ministry” project. Pontificating from a lectern at the Church of the Holy Apostles in […]
Posted inGuides
Robin Harris
You could taste the dust. The heat was a little less than flattening. And somehow you could tell: no air was stirring anywhere within 50 miles of the place. The combination of the three nearly seemed to change the gravitation. Solemn people, long since grown accustomed to economizing–to the bone–on clothing, food and furnishings, measured […]
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For a limited time
It was the scenario every critic dreams about–and dreads. Summer 1997. By accident, I’d discovered a new theater company, producing a new script by two new local playwrights. Just one shot to see their work, since the pair had one weekend in Vernon Pratt’s loft in downtown Durham–an intriguing space no doubt, but still well […]
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Plans for everyone
How comforting to know there will be a place for everyone–at least, temporarily–in the new order of things. Forgive me, did I use the singular? I meant “places.” They’ll have to occupy them all, more or less simultaneously: those cutbacks, you know. People will simply have to double up. It should prove quite a challenge. […]
Posted inArt
You are here
The cartographers reconvene in Durham this week: a colorful crew of expeditionists, pathfinders, nomads and navigators from across the globe. They are nothing if not diverse. Some have made their name in recent years by bushwhacking: finding home in terra nova, making do with shelter that is temporary, portable and partially improvised. Others never travel […]
Posted inNews
Iconography at dusk
How the hell’re they ever gonna get that on stage? It’s the first thing I said after throwing Scott Anderson’s bombastically-titled The Man Who Tried to Save the World across the sofa, the moment I finished reading it. Its subject, Fred Cuny, was a tall Texan who literally rewrote the book on international disaster relief […]