Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
The work of Austin McCormick, the polymath artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV, may be handily classified as burlesque—costumer Zane Pihlstrom provides more than enough feathers, fringes, and pasties to justify it—but that label doesn’t really fit a production that incorporates dance, opera, pop music, and acrobatics as well. All are on display in his newest effort, Seven Sins.
If ever a show were able to make the word eclectic seem insufficient, and excess seem wan, Austin McCormick’s Queen of Hearts is it. Retelling the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice for his Company XIV, McCormick primarily uses Alice in Wonderland but borrows characters from Through the Looking-Glass. That slight mashup aesthetic is more pronounced, though, in the show itself, which is an amalgam of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, The Rocky Horror Show, Cirque du Soleil, and Minsky’s. It’s a wildly exuberant ride, but it helps if you are familiar with the original, since there’s no dialogue.
Founded in 2006 by director and choreographer Austin McCormick, Company XIV has developed a signature fusion of theater, classical and modern dance, opera, drag, circus, live music, burlesque, and performance art. The title of its latest creation, Paris, is a double entendre of sorts—referring at once to the beloved City of Light as well as the legendary prince of Troy. Indeed, Paris unites Grecian gods and goddesses with Parisian flâneurs and can-can girls, resulting in an indulgent, adults-only revue of sublime talent.
