In writing specific plays, contemporary American playwright Steven Deitz has been inspired by Chekhov, Ibsen, P.G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle. For his 2008 play Becky’s New Car, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, he appears to have been inspired by Oprah. Or is it a coincidence that one character gives away lots […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
States of Plays
As we pause after the traditional end of last season and before the start of the next, here’s a retrospective question: Where do the plays we see on the North Coast come from? For many decades the answer would have been easy: New York. But that’s no longer true. Back in the mid-1980s I interviewed […]
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Star Shrek
Shrek was a multimillion-dollar animated movie that spawned a multimillion-dollar Broadway show. Humboldt Light Opera Company doesn’t have access to that level of support. Nevertheless, its production of Shrek The Musical, now on the Van Duzer Theatre stage at HSU in Arcata, is big, bold, fast and assured. It’s also ogre-sized fun. It’s not just […]
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Hesse Fit
Suppose you’re an edgy but also starving New York performer, concocting scripts allowing you to impersonate various movie divas but in genre B-movie stories with vibrant titles like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party (which then actually becomes a B-movie). But after writing the book for a failed musical, you are told by […]
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Gender Blender
The stage has long been a place for disguise, and the truths that disguise may reveal. Within the permeable categories of art and entertainment, performers pretend to be who they are not. Gender has often been an element of that disguise, sometimes forced by the sanctions of a given time. Since women weren’t permitted on […]
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Heir Dresser
The Heir Apparent, now onstage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, is based on a French farce written by Jean-Francois Regnard in 1708. This version is a free adaptation in English rhyme by contemporary American playwright David Ives, who previously adapted comedies by Corneille and Moliere. He adapted this play for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in […]
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Double Trouble
If you go to the brisk, high-spirited, physically witty and generally funny Dell’Arte production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and you aren’t familiar with the play, here’s the premise you need to know: An old man shows up in the marketplace of Ephesus, which is remarkably like the Arcata Plaza. Because he is from […]
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Mad River Preview
Even the high priestess Mary Jane of the past two summers might think this is pretty far out: Dell’Arte opens this year’s Mad River Festival on June 20 with its production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. “It’s a little daunting,” director Michael Fields admitted. “But it’s good for us to push into new territory.” […]
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Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art
That mid-20th century artistic innovations happened in New York, Paris and San Francisco is no surprise, but rural North Carolina? It’s all but forgotten now, but for 23 years many of those who defined American arts came to an isolated YMCA camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains to teach, learn, collaborate and create. Black Mountain […]
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Not Normal
In the musical Next to Normal, now onstage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, Diana is a wife and mother who is being treated for mental illness. The story follows her treatment and how it affects her husband Dan and her teenage daughter Natalie, as well as Natalie’s relationship with her boyfriend Henry. Then […]
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Creepy Characters and Clowns
This coming weekend, May 16-18, graduating Master of Fine Arts students at Dell’Arte International School present the culmination of their thesis projects: the second and final weekend of three plays which they devised and perform. It’s the end of a process that involved weekly presentations to their academic advisers, writing a statement of purpose and […]
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Late Date
How could I write a play for my fellow third graders to perform when it would be nearly a decade before I actually saw a play, live onstage? The short answer is television, specifically situation comedies. It is even now the format that any American audience is most likely to know, including audiences for the […]