Reviews for Theatre en Bloc Performances
Review #1 of 3: THE SECRETARY by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on March 27, 2018
The audience learns quickly than more than one of these characters is certifiable, and the plot twists and turns around dementia until its unavoidably tragic end.
Trigger. The word, both noun and verb, releases the catch on varied symbolism and events of heat, pith, moment, chaos, and consequence. Theatre en Bloc’s production of The Secretary by Kyle John Schmidt, now playing at the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center, explores the trigger on many levels, including that of weaponry that triggers itself seemingly without human agency. The timeliness of The Secretary is nearly perfect. The all-female cast heightens the …
Review: Neva by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on February 20, 2017
Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon provides a fairly rich multi-level text for this tragicomedy of failed revolution, and it's a performance vehicle for Liz Beckham. Dialogues carry all of the show.
NEVA by Guillermo Calderon is the imagining of life after Chekhov for his widow Olga Knipper, played by Liz Beckham. Knipper was an actress in the Moscow Art Theatre. Her opening monologue sets her in a rehearsal studio in St. Petersburg in 1905, six months after Chekhov’s death. She is worried, as all actors are, that she has finally lost it all, and that audiences will hate her for everything, especially her German origins. …
Review: The Drowning Girls by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on October 04, 2016
The flood of images was created to soggy perfection by the three incomparable actresses. I never again want to hear the sentence: “He took my breath away.”
The Drowning Girls is a murder mystery told in nonlinear fashion by the murder victims. The three brides, each drowned in the bath, rise from the water postmortem and sopping wet to tell their tale.The play is definitely a strong textual dialogue play, but not one with parlor scenes in a spacious set with numerous characters, as one would expect from an Agatha Christie mystery. No, here we have a bathroom set, looking perhaps like …
Review: The Totalitarians by Theatre en Bloc
by David Glen Robinson
Published on September 12, 2016
Barbara Chisholm performs a great and memorable role as the driving, power-grabbing, darkly inflected, ultimately daffy Penelope. She shares herself with an immense radiant energy.
Comedies about tragedies have extra bite. Schadenfreude wells up from within the audience and pours out on the hapless, ridiculous characters on stage. In The Totalitarians by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, the laughter is giggly, a little embarrassed, and masked until the second act when audience members yield to their impulses and fall into unabashed guffaws and cheering. After that they see what a tragedy is unfolding before them. Perhaps a few think back to an earlier throwaway line …
Review: Bright Half Life by Theatre en Bloc
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 06, 2016
Captured by the intensity in the Vortex 'pony shed,' one rapidly learns to accept and even embrace abrupt and profoundly disorienting leaps in time and context.
Theatre en Bloc has installed a jolting unpredictable time machine in the 'pony shed' at the Vortex, that orphaned little structure that's at the foot of the drinking deck and adjacent to the outdoor stage. Announced capacity is 15 persons, all classes of seating combined, from donors to regular admission types to the unmonied but curious who pay nothing. Director Jenny Lavery and company exercise some compassion and ingenuity, however, and Sunday evening's 8:30 p.m. …
Review: Jacob's Ladder by Theatre en Bloc
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 04, 2015
If you can pull back from that disturbing central theme you can enjoy solidly entertaining characters, the accomplished actors who inhabit them and the enchanting visual design of Jacob's Ladder.
Blake Addyson's sound design for Jacob's Ladder uses big band dance music to paint the sound picture of the wartime home front in 1944. Those Glenn Miller recordings are a fine sound hook for the audience. But while reflecting on this new play by Dennis Bailey and David Mixner, I happened to hear some Sinatra recordings from that period. Perhaps the cheerful romanticism of Sinatra's early vocal work would have corresponded a bit better …