Before every rehearsal and every performance, the cast and crew stand in a circle. They hold hands, close their eyes, inhale deeply, and exhale fully. “I am light,” they say. “I am love. I am here. I am light. I am love. I am here.” They repeat it over and over, until everyone feels ready […]
By Nina Richards To Micah Kessel, assumption is the enemy of empathy. Empathy is the realization that each person has different, and equally valid, experiences and emotions that inform our every move. Which is why Kessel, Kelley Van Dilla, Adrienne Dent, and Annie Temmink have created an immersive experience to prompt empathic thinking and choice-making […]
Our ability to look at art—to see color, shape, texture—comes from light. We’ll spare you an in-depth science lesson, but most basically, light reflects off objects and into the eye. Cells in the retina (at the back of the eye) convert light into electrical impulses, which the optic nerve sends to the brain. The brain […]
Ring true: Boxer Jack Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight champion, and at the height of the Jim Crow era he was “the most famous and the most notorious African American on Earth,” according to documentarian Ken Burns. Directed by multi-faceted artist and C-VILLE [...]
Hindsight is 1616: It’s a battle to save the legacy of William Shakespeare when the Bard’s mates go on a mad scramble to gather up his disparate writings in Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will. At the time of his death in 1616, Shakespeare was well-off and popular, but had his friends John [...]
When you think of teenage girls, what do you picture? Perhaps you think of your own fast-talking children or your experience in high school. Or maybe you default to cliques and clichés: prom queens and geeks, victims and villains. In its latest production, a Pulitzer Prize- nominated play by [...]
In Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, Dean Cindy Wreen is fed up with a lot of things: her tiny college’s financial difficulties, plans to close an obscure natural history museum, and monogamy, to name a few. While her New England town battles to save a historically inaccurate woolly [...]
Ti Ames loves William Shakespeare. Or rather, Ames loves the plays of William Shakespeare. It’s a love that started when Ames played a fairy in The Tempest at Live Arts at age 9, and it grew when, at 16, Ames became the first black actor to win the English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare [...]
Imagine Romeo and Juliet in an urban, 1950s setting. You’re probably thinking of West Side Story—now replace that play’s tragic elements with absurdist comedy the way only John Waters could write it, and you get Cry-Baby: The Musical, a stage adaptation of the Waters rom-com. Featuring the [...]
Piecing together a Jenga-style puzzle of arranged marriages, mistaken identities and wicked ways, David Ives’ adaptation of The Liar is a cleverly constructed ride through a plot riddled with cutting banter, silliness, jealousy and lies, lies and more lies. The villainous, witty Dorante (Mark [...]
In case you forgot why people still put on pants and leave the house in order to partake in live theater (as opposed to Netflix-ing their way to human-sized sinkholes on the couch), allow Live Arts’ production of Hand to God to spell it out for you. Full-frontal nudity! Cursing in church! Legit [...]
Fun Home is a musical adapted from the autobiographical memoir of graphic artist Alison Bechdel, who chronicles her life from childhood to the present. When Bechdel’s father dies, she starts an introspective adventure, trying to make sense of their complicated and sometimes strained [...]
When I was a tween writing “X-Files” fan fiction, I never suspected my interest in storytelling would lead to an actual career as a writer. But then I enrolled in the creative writing program at a performing arts high school—and discovered my creative power. Dozens of local arts organizations [...]
Enter: a lively dinner party. Lots of crosstalk. Women in a startling array of historical costumes. There’s Isabella Bird, a 19th-century globe-trotter and well-educated author. There’s Joan the Pope, a ninth-century intellectual who lived as a man and briefly became the pope. There’s Dull [...]
The next time you use the Water Street and Second Street crosswalk, look in the Live Arts window. There’s a light on in the lobby—the theater’s ghost light. It’s small and casts yellow light from a transparent glass shade, and, according to superstition, keeps ghosts from haunting the theater [...]
This week Live Arts opens its season by inviting the public into an intimate theater in the round to observe the interior lives of family and friends in Edward Albee’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, A Delicate Balance. Director Fran Smith says it is an eloquent work that “centers around [...]
Adult identical twins Pip and Twig live an insular, codependent existence. Wearing identical pajamas, they wake in their shared bed at the same time every morning and eat identical breakfasts before going about their daily childlike, tandem routine, clothed in identical dress-and-sweater [...]
Told by a charismatic troupe of actors, Pippin is the story of a prince who desperately wants to impress his father, King Charles. The Leading Player convinces Pippin to betray the King instead, and his life goes hopelessly awry. Pippin dreams of love, family and a happy ending—but Leading [...]
Widely considered one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was the first to hit the trifecta with a Tony Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The story centers around the broken dreams and despairing family of [...]
There’s something a bit off about The Realistic Joneses. “Maybe it’s me,” you think at first. You’re sitting so close to the middle-aged couple you’re practically on top of them. She’s talking about the beauty of the night air and the owl she can hear in the distance. He’s staring down at hands [...]
Merging the profound with the trivial, Will Eno’s absurdist script for The Realistic Joneses plays out like a tough-topic sketch comedy. When new neighbors arrive, two couples get to know each other through unlikely circumstances that bring them together and push them apart in unexpected ways. [...]
The teenager-loaded cast and crew of Peter and the Starcatcher “keep the grown-ups on our toes and bring fantastic ideas” according Live Arts’ Bree Luck. The production wields credits for more than 45 community members and offers a special artistic collaboration between apprentice and mentor in [...]
“This play is not about my mother and me,” the character of Lisa insists at the beginning of Well. The play is, in fact, about Lisa and her mother, who cannot heal herself despite her extraordinary ability to heal a changing neighborhood. But Well is about many other things, too—the idea of [...]