Mad as a Hatter
I reviewed AlterTheater’s commissioned world premiere of a Lauren Yee play in today’s Marin Independent Journal, so hie thee over yonder to check it out.
The Right Kind of Trouble
Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind feels both very much of its time and ahead of it. First presented off-Broadway in 1955, a month before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, it’s full of the energy of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the sense that something has to change.
High School Inconsequential
There’s a lot of talk in the theater community about how to bring in younger audiences, and one pretty natural way would seem to be to do plays that appeal to the young’uns by being about them. Of course, just because a play has teenage characters, like Grease or Brighton Beach Memoirs, doesn’t mean they’re going to resonate with teens. I’m stacking the deck by using those examples because they’re period pieces, but it’s a common pitfall for plays by adults about teens to come off as nostalgia pieces or condescending, no matter when they’re set. It’s something that certainly can be done well, but more often it’s not.
