Playwright Crispin Whittell and the determined Guthrie cast endeavor to turn Ivan Turgenev‘s melancholic, poignant, dreamy, and oh-so-Russian novel Home Of The Gentry into a brisk, bracing and breezy drawing room comedy — and they, for the most part, succeed. The story of The Primrose Path (at the Guthrie, through June 15) will be...
Read more »
It’s April, it’s still snowing, and The Guthrie Theater launches a show about ice fishing. What are the chances? The forces of nature, the theater muses and Fate itself must have all played supporting roles. But the theater also patiently angled for this one and after a long, cold winter, the Guthrie’s landed a...
Read more »
The past is ineluctably and achingly present in Jon Robin Baitz‘s moving (and occasionally frustrating) drama, Other Desert Cities (at the Guthrie through March 24). The Wyeths, Polly and Lyman, have left smoggy L.A., chockfull of ego and intrigue and have moved to the desert, to happy happy Gerald Ford-land – Palm Springs –...
Read more »
It’s January. Your impulse is to curl up under a throw blanket on the couch and disappear into a good book, right? Or a fine, classic movie? The Guthrie Theater’s new production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is a better pairing for the season than either. Dark, long, a lot of...
Read more »
Do we count William Shakespeare‘s pastoral romance As You Like It (the Acting Company, performing in the Guthrie‘s Dowling Studio, through Feb 3) among the bard’s weaker efforts? A mere pot-boiler, a crowd-pleaser? Lovers and court sophisticates retreating to the Forest of Arden, finding love and country simplicity and little else? Many literary critics...
Read more »
The Servant Of Two Masters (at the Guthrie, through January 20). First some mechanicals come out in semi-darkness, speaking pidgin Italian. They kill the lights and we have an exquisite firefly effect: twinkling lights, hundreds of them, seeming to float o’er the McGuire stage (three cheers for lighter Chuan-Chi Chan). Then the lights shoot...
Read more »
The Guthrie Theater has opened the third in its series of plays by Christopher Hampton: the American premier of Embers, based on the novel by Sándor Márai as translated by Carol Brown Janeway and directed by Joe Dowling. Beautiful, sad and absorbing, this is a piece to be pondered and savored – a leisurely...
Read more »
The Civil War. A crucible struggle. An informed citizen must study the war and understand that it wasn’t the Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys, a war fought simply to end the vicious institution of slavery. The questions raised – and fought over – remain pertinent. What kind of country do we inhabit? What...
Read more »
The Guthrie Theater’s 50th season begins with “A Celebration of Christopher Hampton” and Hampton’s play, Tales from Hollywood, a canny “what if” that follows the fortunes of writers forced out of Europe prior to WW II by the Nazi’s mounting violence and threats. The lives of Ödön von Horváth, an Eastern European playwright and novelist, brothers...
Read more »
Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s The Brothers Size (a Pillsbury House Theatre and The Mount Curve Company co-production, performing in the Guthrie‘s Dowling Studio, through September 29) is, on a superficial level, a troubled-young-brother drama. Oshoosi Size, recently released from the penitentiary, has moved in with his stolid older brother Ogun, automobile mechanic, and struggles: to...
Read more »
