LITTLE GREEN PIG THEATRICAL CONCERN: THIS IS NOT A NOVEL Through March 11 The Scrap Exchange’s ReUse Arts Center, Durham www.littlegreenpig.com It was no mere technical hiccup that waylaid my high school production of Oklahoma. Instead, it was the lighting equivalent of a grand mal seizure: a memory dump that cascaded through hundreds of programmed […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Lights Up the Mathematics of the Mind
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ★★★★Through Feb. 26 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham Artists know that embracing restrictions can spark creativity. A visual artist who limits herself to variations on a certain hue or a composer who drastically narrows his choices in instrumentation accepts those constraints in order to explore the […]
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In Bright Half Life, Small Life Decisions and Big Cultural Shifts Cast Ripples Through a Same-Sex Interracial Partnership
Bright Half Life Through March 4 Manbites Dog Theater, Durham www.manbitesdogtheater.org The quote’s a paraphrase of Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.” But what happens when playwright Tanya Barfield takes us sideways instead, through four and a half decades of a lesbian relationship, in her drama Bright Half […]
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Theater Review: A Colony of Broken People Explore Imagination, Sex, Anesthesia, Detox, and Reinvention in The Night Alive
The Night Alive★★★★ Through Feb. 25 North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre, Raleigh It can be a good thing when a set triggers flashbacks before a show begins. Prior to the first light cue in Honest Pint Theatre’s The Night Alive, designer Thomas Mauney’s squalid little flat took me back to the Hotel New Hampshire. […]
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Theater Review: Raleigh Little Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors Isn’t Overacted. That’s an Issue for a Farce.
One Man, Two Guvnors ★★★Through Feb. 26 Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh If you doubt that One Man, Two Guvnors, the theatrical time trip on offer at Raleigh Little Theatre, is up to the minute, take a moment to consider the number of jobs you have to work to make a living wage. If n > […]
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The Inherently Political Nature of Theater is Exposed, with Varying Results, in The God Game and Zuccotti Park
½THE GOD GAME Through Feb. 19 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleighwww.sonorousroadtheatre.com ZUCOTTI PARK Through Feb. 26 Umstead Park UCC, Raleighwww.thejusticetheaterproject.org As I noted last week in “27 Reasons We Love the Triangle Right Now,” the ancient Greeks used theater to consider the thorniest political problems of their day. What’s less obvious, though, is that theater is […]
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Sonorous Road Productions Is Moving to Hillsborough Street in June
Prospects for the region’s independent theater scene look brighter today, after Sonorous Road Productions announced that it would relocate to a new facility on Hillsborough Street in June. The news follows a span of uncertainty about Sonorous Road’s fate after the building it currently occupies on Oberlin Road was sold. After months of searching and […]
Posted inTheater
Meet the African-American Actor Who Said No to Eugene O’Neill and Paid the Price
N Friday, Feb. 10–Sunday, Feb. 26, $18–$24 Theatre in the Park, Raleigh www.theatreinthepark.com Adrienne Earle Pender knows why actor Charles Sidney Gilpin isn’t celebrated alongside Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, and other early pioneers of black theater in America. Alcoholism, she admits, was part of the problem; so was an artist’s ego that sometimes sabotaged his […]
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Theater Review: Yes, the Touring Version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at DPAC Has Been Updated, and Yes, Pat McCrory Gets Called Out
Hedwig and the Angry Inch★★★ ½ Through Sunday, Feb. 5 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham The year before the Berlin Wall came down, the title character of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now in Durham on a national tour following a 2014 Broadway production, was in his early twenties when he was permanently disfigured by […]
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Theater Review: Don’t Dismiss Intimate Apparel at PlayMakers as a Mere Period Piece
Intimate Apparel ★★★★Through Feb. 12 PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill It’s tempting to dismiss the faithful production by PlayMakers Rep of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel as a period piece. Based on the life of the playwright’s great-grandmother, the 2003 drama chronicles the life and the loneliness of Esther (Rasool Jahan) a black woman who carved […]