The Big Thirst It’s been said that water is today’s oil/gold/your choice of valuable commodity. Water is a lot simpler — and a lot more complicated — than that. It may be just endlessly recycled dinosaur pee, but it’s also integral to the web of life — something we’ve become all too aware of in […]
Pat Bitton
Posted inArts + Scene
Thesis Pieces
Incoming MFA students at Dell’Arte embark on a journey that takes them from learning physical awareness and responsiveness, voice, movement, improvisation and ensemble play, to using those techniques toward character, adaptation and tragedy projects, and eventually to an internship with the Dell’Arte Company. Along the way, they undertake a week-long rural residency, a community-based arts […]
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Dead Men’s Tales
The story behind Terrence McNally’s 2014 play Mothers and Sons first emerged in the playwright’s 1988 film André’s Mother, in which Katharine Gerard, the eponymous mother, meets Cal, André’s lover, at the memorial service for her son. Fast forward a couple of decades (McNally took a little creative license with the passage of time) and […]
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Seeing Double
Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is an unsubtle tale of mistaken identity. It’s one of the Bard’s more accessible plays and one of his few true farces. Staging Shakespeare is challenging for even top-tier theater companies, but North Coast Repertory’s production pushes a lot of the right buttons for a family-friendly, though slightly naughty, night […]
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The Laws of the (Schoolyard) Jungle
Rudyard Kipling wrote the original Jungle Book stories in the 1890s while living in Vermont, but the root of the stories lies in colonial India, where he spent time as a child and young adult. There, stories abound of children snatched from villages by wolves, a very few of whom returned as children crawling on […]
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Eat First, Moralize Later
Dickens has Fagin and his band of pickpockets. Brecht has Mr. Peachum and his army of beggars. London’s Victorian underworld in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera is a lot like the London of Oliver Twist, but with considerably more blurred moral boundaries. In Mr. Peachum’s world, the main competition in the business of self-enrichment is […]
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Hearth Warming
Louisa May Alcott’s iconic 1860s-era novel Little Women may seem an unlikely choice for a musical, but one person’s impossible task is another’s irresistible challenge. Much in the vein of the admonition that one chooses to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard, Alcott’s oft-adapted künstlerroman found its […]
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Rollicking Through the Redwoods
If you’re looking to inject a little magic into the holiday season, Li’l Red in the Redwoods would be a fine place to start. Based on the classic Little Red Riding Hood folk tale, this production draws on myriad sources from around the world, including the cultures and traditions of the multinational cast. The “Little […]
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The Meaning of Motherhood and the Price of Favors
England has never quite figured out its relationship with post-colonial Africa. “Child” Africa grew up and left home but instead of becoming a well-behaved, younger version of its “parent,” it rebelled and built empires of its own. Those are the consequences personified by the characters in Lee Blessing’s Going to St. Ives, an acutely drawn […]
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Keeping the Story Straight
When Sir Walter Scott wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” he was no doubt thinking more military than marital battlefields, but Neil Simon’s Rumors, written almost two centuries later in 1988, is still as relevant today in reminding us that, when we first practice to deceive, we still need to be able to […]