Table Salt Productions premiered the third new work in its first season, offering a personal look at a moment in the revolution which transformed Iran’s political picture in the early 1980’s. This was writer Ali Ravi’s first foray into dramatizing…
Category: Theater
August: Osage County at Ordway Center for the Performing Arts
The setup of Tracy Letts‘s wonderful August: Osage County (at the Ordway, through March 21, ordway.org) is familiar: the family patriarch has died under mysterious circumstances and his three daughters, the “agitated Weston sisters”, have arrived at the family manse…
The Vaudevillian, Spirit of the American Dream at Southern Theater
Attending an event at the Southern Theater feels like taking a step back in time. Layers of remodeling and redecorating, one imagines – along with its history – have been stripped down to the bare and imperfect brick walls and…
Music Lovers, a Workhaus Collective Production at The Playwrights’ Center
There are plenty of things to like about Alan Berks’ new play Music Lovers (March 12th-28th at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis). The aphorism-laden and witty script will have you leaving the theater comparing memorable lines with your companions, and the…
Iron Ring, a Children’s Theatre Company Production
Iron Ring (on the Children’s Theatre Company mainstage, 2400 Third Ave, through April 10, childrenstheatre.org) adapted by Charles Way from a novel by the gifted Lloyd Alexander is a journey story in the grandly mythic Joseph Campbell tradition. Way (one of…
Violet, a Theater Latté Da production at The Guthrie Theater
Theater Latté Da’s new musical, Violet – nicely suited to the Guthrie’s black box space, the Dowling Studio Theater – is a tight little ensemble piece that spins along like the bus carrying its title character on her literal and…
Somebody/Nobody at Mixed Blood Theatre
Deranged starlet Sheena Keener flees the Surf Awards (“All those eyes”), stumbles out of her limo, rolls down a bebrambled freeway embankment and now with a photogenic scrape on her pampered forehead pounds on the wobbly door of Loli’s cinderblock…
Black Pearl Sings at Penumbra Theatre
Playwright Frank Higgins does two very smart things with his vivid Black Pearl Sings! (at Penumbra, 270 N. Kent Street, St. Paul, through March 14, penumbratheatre.org). First, he shoehorns an amazingly wide range of Depression-era America into his story: the humid…
My Antonia at Illusion Theater
I will admit that I wondered why Illusion Theater (528 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis) Â might pick this standard in American literature classes for a new adaptation. I know the book well, and even after years away from the classroom, I could…
According to Coyote at The Children’s Theatre Company
The Trickster pops up everywhere. Reynard the Fox, Prometheus, Eshu (in the Yorba culture), the Monkey King (in Chinese mythology). In western literature, the quintessential Trickster is probably Shakespeare’s Puck. The character appears most vividly, though, in the vast and varied Native…