Boston Metro Spotlight: August 2009
August is the laziest month, theatrically, but there’s always a smattering of intriguing offerings. In Boston, the American Repertory Theatre gets a jump on the season with new artistic director Diane Paulus’ inaugural project, a revival of her long-running Off-Broadway hit The Donkey Show, in which Studio 54 meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream (August 21-October 31). The Huntington Theatre continues its sixth Breaking Ground Festival of readings (through August 5), and Cirque du Soleil makes a brief stop with Alegria — Spanish for “joy” — at BU’s Agganis Arena, August 26-30.
Among fringe companies taking advantage of the momentary lull are the Boston Actors Theater with Joey C. Pelletier’s Where Moments Hung Before, about an AIDS-related funeral, at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater (August 6-16), and the new Small Theatre Alliance of Boston (S.T.A.B.) launching FeverFest ’09, a collection of short works on the theme of “friction,” at the Factory Theatre (August 6-16).
In Greater Boston, Watertown’s Arsenal Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre hosts two fledgling companies: Flat Earth Theatre with Blood Relations, about Lizzie Borden (August 7-15), and Exquisite Corps presenting Love’s Fire, six short plays inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets (August 28-30). Waltham’s Reagle Players present La Cage aux Folles with original Broadway cast members Jamie Ross and David Engel (August 13-22). On the North Shore, Gloucester Stage Company mounts Edward Albee’s The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia? (August 6-23); former Rockette Joanna Rush’s one-woman, R-rated memoir Asking for It (August 16-17); and founding director Israel Horovitz’s Sins of the Mother, set locally in this working seaport (August 27-September 13). Heading south, the Gurnet Theatre Project presents an outdoor Macbeth at the Myles Standish State Monument Reservation in Duxbury (August 7-16).
The venerable Cape Playhouse in Dennis offers Smokey Joe’s Café (August 3-15); a star-laden Moon over Buffalo, featuring Gary Beach and Hunter Foster (August 17-29); and the Tony Award-winning ventriloquism tour-de-force, Jay Johnson, the Two & Only (August 31-September 12). On the Outer Cape, the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre offers a choice of edgy, comedic new fare: Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed on the Julie Harris Stage (August 6-September 5) and, on the intimate Harbor Stage, Stephen Karam’s Speech and Debate (August 21-September 27). At the Provincetown Theater, Counter-Productions presents Working (August 2-25), a musicalization of the Studs Terkel anthology conceived in 1978 by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso. James Edwin Parker’s 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night is back at Provincetown’s Art House Theatre (August 7-September 6), under the direction of David Drake. Out on Martha’s Vineyard, Tony nominee Johanna Day is set to star in Kathleen Tolan’s Memory House — a funny/touching two-hander about a single mother and her college-application-resistant daughter — at the Vineyard Playhouse (August 12-September 5).
The Berkshires are still super-busy. As a special event, the Williamstown Festival Theater hosts Richard Thomas portraying Tennessee Williams in the solo show Blanche and Beyond (August 2). WTF’s innovative Nikos Stage launches Melinda Lopez’s Caroline in Jersey, with Lea Thompson — who played another Caroline on TV — in the title role, that of an under-employed actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The Mainstage selection for the month is Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms, a 1960s comedy about English academics directed by Maria Aitken. Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company hops aboard A Streetcar Named Desire, with triple Tony nominee Marin Mazzie playing Blanche vs. Christopher Innvar’s Stanley (August 6-29). BSC will also present a return engagement of Mark St. Germain’s new play, Freud’s Last Session (August 14-30).
Lenox’s Shakespeare & Co. has branched way beyond the Bard this summer. Newest entries include an early John Patrick Shanley play, The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, about two generations of painters torn between their work and romantic attachments (August 7-September 6); Dennis Krasunick’s comic Shakespeare olio Word Play (August 13-September 6); and J.T Rogers’ White People (August 21-September 4), a 2000 meditation on race which should get some mileage out of the recent Henry Louis Gates, Jr. fracas. For the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, director Anders Cato has co-translated a new adaptation of the Ibsen classic Ghosts. The distinguished cast for this mainstage production includes David Adkins, Mia Dillon, Jonathan Epstein, Tara Franklin, and Randy Harrison (August 11-29). Meanwhile, on BTF’s Unicorn Stage, David Auburn directs Zayd Dohm’s Sick, a dark comedy about a family of germaphobes living on New York’s Lower East Side (August 18-September 6).
