William S. Kowinski

In 1868, Louisa May Alcott created a classic American story that enthralled and inspired generations of (mostly) girls, by writing about aspects of her own life and family — and also by ignoring other aspects. In Little Women, a mother and four sisters are isolated in a small New England town, dreaming their dreams despite […]

The mascot of the University of Wisconsin’s Big Ten football team is (like the state of Wisconsin’s) the badger. There’s a costumed Bucky Badger on the sideline, and thousands of screaming fans identifying themselves as badgers. But Professor Harold Burroughs of that university takes this badger thing even further. As portrayed by David Ferney in […]

I had my doubts. I was going to a show called Bad Dates, written while Sex in the City was hot, by a New York playwright who made her living in television: a monologue about romantic misadventures by a woman surrounded by her several hundred pairs of shoes. When I could be at home witnessing […]

Tina Howe nearly nabbed the Pulitzer Prize for Painting Churches in 1984, and by 1986, when I saw the Virginia Stage Company production in Norfolk, the play was on its way to becoming a regional theatre staple. (The cast I saw was Broadway veteran Avril Gentles, regional theatre stalwart Wyman Pendleton and young Jordan Baker, […]

The Independent Eye’s Mythic Kitchen troupe, based in Sebastopol, returned to the North Coast last weekend for two shows at the Arcata Playhouse. With this version of their Rash Acts, they were trying something new, more or less. They’ve used puppets before — co-founder Elizabeth Fuller, who brought her show Dream House to the Playhouse […]

In The Wild Guys, currently at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, we’re asked to believe that Andy (played by Mike Halton), an older executive and experienced men’s group leader, takes three men he barely knows on a retreat without telling them anything about what they’re doing. He invites Stewart (Joe Hiney), a produce manager in one of […]

There’s a very funny, very short science fiction story by Terry Bisson that I first heard as a radio dialog, in which two alien spacefarers are passing near Earth. One describes the intelligent species below while the other can’t believe what he’s hearing. “They’re meat?” he keeps repeating. “They have brains made out of meat? […]

Last April, Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, produced by a Canadian mask and puppet group, the Calgary Animated Objects Society (CAOS) in conjunction with Dell’Arte and Four on the Floor Productions, came to the Arcata Playhouse for two weekends of workshop performances. In the two performances I saw of that show, Crawdaddy (played by James Griffiths) […]