by Michael Meigs
Published on November 21, 2013
Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre takes places in the stark and arid landscape of the mind. The setting is rural Spain, somewhere far out in the countryside, and the characters are peasant families. They have no names, with the single exception of Leonardo, the angry and frustrated young farmer who precipitates the tragedy. García Lorca identifies the others by role: the intended groom (novio), the bride (novia), the mother, the neighbor, the father of the bride. …
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 19, 2013
This play is as toothsome as a plate of scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. My one request would have been, "Please, may I have some more?" By that, I mean that I'd really like to have seen more.
The delightful wit and frivolity of Oscar Wilde's conceit for this play and the immense seriousness his characters apply to it make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduring favorite. This is the fourth staging of the work in the region since I began writing about theatre nearly five years ago, and it never grows stale. Wilde is not Shakespeare, but his work has a similar vitality and adaptability. His razor-sharp teasing of a distinct sector of …
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 19, 2013
The three Equity actors are fine and capable professionals, but I was left with the feeling that there was entirely too little room for St. Ed's undergraduate talent in the production.
Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, an intimate and claustrophobic study of misrule. There are no great battles here, no dazzling displays of fancy; this mythical Vienna has a stifling ambiance, a combination of bureaucratic neglect, fetid bordello and sterile cloister. One can seek to read it as a comedy, which to some extent director Michelle Polgar has done, but one can also see it as a meditation on zealotry. Vincentio, Duke …
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2012
Fully physically mature Equity actors occupy the key roles in The Crucible, helping to establish the rhythm, tension and impact. Among the student actors in this cast, Johnny Joe Trillayes and Sophia Franzella rise to the same level.
One measure of the power of Arthur Miller's drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692 is the startling transformation of familiar actors. Tiny Sophia Franzella, now a junior at St. Edward's, has charmed audiences with her wildly comic and mischievous personae in The Imaginary Invalid, Urinetown and A Year with Frog and Toad. Here, as the malicious and vindictive accuser Abigail Williams, Franzella is smooth faced duplicity, a murderous woman-child driven by spite and lust. Hers is a …
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2011
A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of no-hopers who might just be hybrids of The Stupids and The Nastys -- 'Deliverance'-style degenerates, except that they're out somewhere in the great American West.
Sam Shepard wrote and directed A Lie of The Mind off Broadway in 1985. It won awards as best play then and the 2010 New York production won the Lucille Lortel award as best revival. Musing over the claustrophobic evening with these characters, I recalled Harry Allard's picture book collaboration with James Marshall in the 1970's featuring a charmingly inept cartoon family named The Stupids. A Lie of the Mind is a hard evening with a bunch of …
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 12, 2011
Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the last scene of the 1890 play of the same name?
The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty has an abundance of clever and not much of depth or heart. Director David M. Long does a bang-up job of making it a whizzing entertainment, having recruited three gifted Equity professionals to work with the six St. Ed's Equity-candidate actors relegated to secondary roles. Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the …