William S. Kowinski

Playwrights Beth Henley and Marsha Norman made waves with their Pulitzer Prize-winning plays in the early 1980s. They were something new on the American theatre scene: Southern women playwrights, who both got their start at the Actor’s Theatre in Louisville, and not in the Northeast. Their big plays (Norman’s ’night, Mother, Henley’s Crimes of the […]

Federico Garcia Lorca achieved lasting fame with his poetry in the 1920s and ’30s — first in Spain and then internationally — but he was also a popular playwright, with major productions in Madrid. Inverted Alba (A Fable and Roundelay After Images by Garcia Lorca), currently at Dell’Arte, uses elements of four Lorca plays and […]

Guys and Dolls is a classic American musical, derived from Damon Runyon’s stories about gamblers, hustlers and show biz characters of 1930s New York, with outstanding songs by Frank Loesser. Its Broadway premiere lasted from 1950 to 1953, and it’s been revived there five times since — the most recent Broadway run ended this June. […]

Tapping into his own youthful indiscretions and the distresses of his chronic ill health, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a novel based on a nightmare about the good Dr. Jekyll, who invented a drug that transformed him into the evil Mr. Hyde. Stevenson joined Mary Shelley and other 19th century authors in focusing on the ambiguous […]

Kimberly Haile (formerly known as Kim Hodel) has had featured roles with the North Coast Repertory Theatre, including Roxy in Chicago and Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, but this time she’s central to the success of Love List, the buoyant comedy now earning laughs at NCRT in Eureka. It’s not that she carries it by herself. […]

Cornerstone Theater generated some high-wattage alums: movie and TV star Amy Brenneman was a founding member of its acting ensemble, and Bill Rauch, its founding artistic director in 1986, now runs the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But Cornerstone became legendary for its collaborations with local communities on grassroots productions in North Dakota, Nevada, Oregon, West Virginia […]

Dell’Arte was basically a mime and comedy school with a summer festival when its fledgling company of players developed their first full-length ensemble work: a script gleaned from fishing trip experiences at a volatile time, plus community input and an obsession with Raymond Chandler novels. They called it Intrigue at Ah-Pah. After outdoor premieres in […]

"A play was like a watch that laughed." So wrote theatre critic Walter Kerr, describing the mechanism of Broadway comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, like The Front Page, Room Service, You Can’t Take It With You and the 1939 play now on stage at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, Arsenic and Old Lace. Situations and relationships […]

As a teenager, Mel Brooks’ summer job at a resort hotel was insulting guests, parodying popular singers and improvising outrageous acts as a kind of court jester called a tummler. Entertainment was a major attraction for the mostly Jewish patrons of mountain resorts in New York and Massachusetts. The stage shows were directly in the […]