HEISENBERG Through Sunday, Feb. 5 Murphey School Auditorium, Raleigh www.burningcoal.org With a title like Heisenberg, it bears noting that Simon Stephens’s drama, which Burning Coal Theatre Company opened last weekend a month after it closed on Broadway, isn’t some scientific historical thriller like Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. For what it’s worthand it’s actually worth quite a […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inTheater
Kara Walker’s Silhouettes and SLIPPAGE’s Dance Response Explode Ideas About Black Bodies
SLIPPAGE: REVERSE–GESTURE–REVIEWED 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, 2 & 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27, free–$5 KARA WALKER: HARPER’S PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (ANNOTATED) Through March 5, free–$5 The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham www.nasher.duke.edu Kara Walker’s current exhibit in the Nasher’s Incubator Gallery is called Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). […]
Posted inArt
A Superlative Adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Packs Centuries of Insight into a Fleet Eighty Minutes
ORLANDO Manbites Dog Theater, Durham Through Jan. 28 www.manbitesdogtheater.org In her novel Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf observed that it takes some time to write a decent poem: say, five hundred years. To find a true soul mate? Four centuries, not including the necessary intervals of doubt and self-recrimination. And if you’re trying to genuinely […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: An In-Process Adaptation of De Profundis Is Still Floundering in Oscar Wilde’s Seas
De Profundis ★ ½ PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill Through Sunday, Jan. 15 Last year, PlayMakers Repertory Company’s second-stage series devoted an entire season to two-to-five-year-old repertory solo works by out-of-town playwrights, in a drastically smaller-scale, alt-theater version of the itinerant shows that visit DPAC and DECPA. So it was entirely appropriate to raise the […]
Posted inArt
David Harrower Lives Up to His Name in Blackbird, a Challenging Portrait of Abuse
BLACKBIRD Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh Through Sunday, Jan. 22 www.sonorousroadtheatre.com If you’ve ever abused another human, playwright David Harrower has an uncomfortable reminder for you in his taut two-person drama, Blackbird, which South Stream Productions is currently performing at Raleigh’s Sonorous Road Theatre. Somewhere, someone remembers everything you ever did to them. They have the […]
Posted inArt
Common Ground Closed. Sonorous Road Might Be Next. Is It Curtains for Small, Affordable Theaters in the Triangle?
The small, independent companies that have often defined the cutting edge of theater in our region have long made a virtue of doing without. For decades, their productions have embraced the essence of drama, frequently without opulent costumes, lavish sets, or theater spaces specifically designed to accommodate them. Minimalism is attractive to many young theater […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: Take High Tea with Little Women in the Women’s Theatre Festival’s Holiday Production
Little Women★★★Through Dec. 18 Women’s Theatre Festival @ Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh At its heart, the Women’s Theatre Festival is actually a conveyance: a theatrical vehicle intent on moving the region (and, by extension, our culture) forward by bringing a broader array of women’s voices and stories to the fore, and by leading women to […]
Posted inTheater
The Women’s Theatre Festival Drums Up Unprecedented Support for Gender Equality on Local Stages
It’s rare for an organization receiving an Indies Arts Award not to have existed at the start of the year in which it was honored. But few of the Women’s Theatre Festival‘s unorthodox achievements in its first year have gone by the book. After its founder, Raleigh’s indefatigable Ashley Popio, posted on Facebook in early […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: A Leading Local Theater Artist Mines Her Life’s Schisms, Contradictions, and Eerie Beauty in Ethelred the Unready
Ethelred the Unready★★★ ½ Through Dec. 10 Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, various venues There are hundreds of professional actors in the area, but prior to Dana Marks’s Ethelred the Unready, only three have produced an autobiographical one-person show in the last decade. Why? Solo performance is daunting; autobiographical solo work is even harder. In […]
Posted inCulture
Theater Review: Is The May Queen an Indictment of the Male Gaze or an Apologia for a Stalker?
The May Queen★★★ Through Dec. 11 PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill Molly Smith Metzler surely intended her play The May Queen as more than an apologia for a stalker, but it’s hard to leave the current production at PlayMakers Repertory Company without the nagging sense that her critique of an annual, real-world rite of spring […]