Post Script

Forward Theater opened the long overdue production of Jordan Harrison’s The Amateurs in the Playhouse at Overture Center on Nov. 5. Originally scheduled to debut in March 2020, the play was in its final rehearsals when the theater closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After experiencing the play in person, in a mostly-full house, it is easy to see why director Jen Uphoff Gray wanted to keep The Amateurs in FTC’s 2021-’22 season. Her smart, economical directing is supported by a stunning cast, led by Josh Krause and Kat Wodtke. Paired with simple, elegant design by Nathan Stuber (set) and Jason Fassl (lighting), the FTC production actually surpasses the script in demonstrating the power of storytelling, needed most when the world feels darkest.

When I was a little girl, growing up in a starkly white small town, I remember learning about the Civil War and the fact that Black people had been enslaved, bought and sold, and treated in unconscionable ways. As a six year-old with a keen sense of right and wrong, I reasoned that white and Black people would have to switch places at some point: I would have to take my turn being enslaved. That seemed only fair.

Since that time of clumsy schoolyard equivocation, there have been many calls for compensating descendants of enslaved people for the atrocities done to them throughout American history, not to mention the continuing fundamental mistreatment of Black people in America through systemic racism. But as Jamie England’s character Muggs states in Broom Street’s production of the new play Genealogy, white people don’t like to talk about it. Which is exactly why this play, written by T.J Elliott and Joe Queenan, and skillfully directed by Dana Pellebon, is important viewing. We need to talk about it.

Renaissance Theaterworks opened their first post-pandemic production, The Cake, in their new home, The Next Act Theater just down the street from their old digs at the Broadway Theatre Center. To welcome audiences back to in-person performances they are serving up a buttercream frosting-filled family drama with a ripped-from-the-headlines twist. Directed by RTW’s Artistic Director Suzan Fete, it’s a well paced look at chosen family members who love, but can’t understand one another.

I have never been skydiving. But in Strollers Theatre’s production of Ripcord, by the David Lindsay-Abaire, I began to understand why the playwright used the experience as a central metaphor.

Part way through the first act, a young, fearless, and incredibly enthusiastic skydiving instructor named Lewis explains to a panicking newcomer: “You’re gonna like this Abby! It’s just like life! You get shoved out into nothingness, then it’s a long, terrifying free fall to certain death! Which is why you gotta pull the ripcord, baby! Slow yourself down and look around while you can!”

In her director’s notes for American Players Theatre’s new production of The Taming of the Shrew, Shana Cooper answers the first, most obvious question lurking in the modern audience’s mind: How can you do this show now? And why would you?

Shakespeare’s thorny chestnut Shrew has fallen off the favorites list in the last few decades, just as The Merchant of Venice has, because tastes, social norms, and the notion of what is funny have changed radically in the last four centuries. After hundreds of years of laughing at the titular shrew Kate, as she is taught how to behave by her eccentric, domineering new husband Petruchio, the idea of starving and gaslighting a woman while depriving her of a voice and a good night’s sleep isn’t comedy, it’s unnerving. It reads as abuse and misogyny used to a sinister end: to break a woman’s spirit and make her eternally subservient.

After an 18-month pause due to COVID-19, Capital City Theatre is back in the Playhouse at Overture Center. The company that began with quirky, small-scale musicals like Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill and Violet, then moved on to larger, show-stopping productions of On the Town and The Hunchback at Notre Dame, has made its post-pandemic debut with a mediocre, mostly obscure Kander and Ebb musical revue, The World Goes ‘Round.

The production pays cursory homage to the two musicals that made John Kander and Fred Ebb successful — Cabaret and Chicago. But the majority of the show languishes in a strange variety of ballads, comic pieces and songs bemoaning modern life and lost love. (There is also one hoedown.) The result is a disconnected slurry of unfamiliar, not terribly memorable tunes from musicals you’ve never heard of, like 70, Girls, 70; The Rink; The Act; and Flora the Red Menace. They are performed very well, but with energy that has no place to go, since the evening has no thematic thread, little context for individual songs, and few characters to speak of.

Skylight Theatre has a message for patrons who may have some anxiety about coming back to the Broadway Theatre Center -- “Let it Go!” Long before Disney’s ice princess Elsa sang that refrain, a group of laid-off steelworkers turned exotic male dancers used it as their finale in The Full Monty. Skylight’s first production in 18 months and the first outing for new Artistic Director Michael Unger, The Full Monty features a large, talented cast with a mix of locals and Broadway veterans. Eschewing the mini production restrictions of the COVID period, the company fills the stage with men and women making the best of the hard times in 1990s Buffalo, New York, amidst high unemployment due to the closure of the local steel mill. Based on the sleeper hit British film of the same name, The Full Monty is an entertaining look at a group of men pushed to their breaking point -- ready to do just about anything in order to pay their bills -- even perform as a homegrown version of the Chippendales.

There is, inarguably, something monumental to celebrate as Next Act opens its first in-person production since the pandemic began in March, 2020. But instead of a leap for joy that audiences can once again gather to enjoy live theater, Next Act’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s Three Viewings feels like a quiet, slow, on-ramp back to “normal life” that is still very much under construction. Directed by Edward Morgan and featuring Next Act favorites Cassandra Bissell, Carrie Hitchcock, and the organization’s aristic director David Cecsarini, Three Viewings is a compact evening of three monologues that are very loosely related. Set in a funeral parlor in a small, Midwestern town where everyone knows everyone else, three broken people come to wrestle with their feelings about the recently deceased. There is love bordering on obsession, revenge covering up staggering grief, and the revelation that sometimes we don’t really know our own spouse until after they are gone. It’s an unsettling set of confessions that occasionally shock, but don’t quite gel as a chapters in a bigger story. Expertly performed and prouduced, Three Viewings isn’t the bold, theatrical show we want to see, but it will tide audiences over until next time.

As the long-term substitute teacher for a high school English class a few years ago, I taught the ancient Greek classic Oedipus to a room full of bored, cynical 17 year-olds. And while I got them through the other assigned texts that semester, I really struggled to find a way to make the Sophocles tragedy exciting (or even interesting) for the students. I told them about the festival of Dionysos, the ornate, exaggerated masks, and the groundbreaking actor Thespis. I showed them pictures of huge amphitheatres chiseled into hills that have survived for thousands of years, and tried to wade through the text page by page, decoding the poetry of the chorus. Desperate to make the enormous tragedy relevant, I told them we study it because it was one of the first plays presented in Western history. It was the beginning of an art form that is the most vibrant, necessary, challenging, revelatory means of communication ever to be invented.

They yawned while copying and pasting the answers to my study questions from SparkNotes. They bombed the test.

Forward Theater welcomed audiences back to live performances at Overture Center on September 9, and for some viewers it felt like breathing again. Yes, there were vaccination card checks at will-call, and everyone seated in The Playhouse was masked. But for anyone connected to the performing arts — either as creators or consumers — it was a return to something essential, and there is much to celebrate in that.

Theaters and ticket buyers have had a lot to think about during the forced intermission of the past 18 months; what should theater experiences look like going forward? How can they be more inclusive? How does theater address the calls for social justice and racial equality that have arisen during this same period of the shutdown? Will cash-strapped theaters choose to mount small productions to get back on their feet? Or will they wow audiences with over-the-top evenings that truly demonstrate how live performances can never be the same as those seen on a screen?