Boston Metro Spotlight: September 2009
(© Huntington Theatre Company)
For theatergoers, September is a little like spring training: it’s a chance to see how the teams are shaping up, and who the promising newcomers are. For its season launch, the Huntington Theatre is reviving August Wilson’s Fences (September 11-October 11), directed by longtime collaborator Kenny Leon and starring John Beasley as an embittered Negro Leagues star turned garbage man; his success came too soon, on a segregated playing field.
The Lyric Stage brings back that Cole Porter gem, Kiss Me, Kate (September 4-October 10). Company One’s The Superheroine Monologues, written by top local funnymen John Kuntz and Rick Park, had such a successful SRO run last spring, it’s back for another round, at the Plaza Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, September 10-26. At the BCA’s Roberts Studio Theatre, Speakeasy Stage brings together two of Boston’s best actresses — Nancy E. Carroll and Paula Plum — for the New England premiere of Evan Smith’s The Savannah Disputation (September 18-October 17), about a pair of Catholic spinsters contending with a wily young Pentecostal missionary.
The Institute of Contemporary Art will be welcoming the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s post-Katrina version of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (September 26-27), which played New York in 2006. In Cambridge’s Central Square Theater, the Underground Railroad Theater hosts a recent entry from the New York International Fringe Festival: Gioia De Cari’s Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through M.I.T.’S Male Math Maze (September 10-20).
The Flying Karamazov Brothers bring Flings & Eros, a brand-new show inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell (September 10-October 4). The Stoneham Theatre offers Studs Terkel’s The Good War: A Musical Collage of World War II (September 10-October 4). And Kate Warner, the new artistic director of Watertown’s New Repertory Theatre, helms Mister Roberts (September 13-October 4).
Tennessee Williams fans will be happily making the trek out to the Charlestown Working Theater to catch outstanding local actor Larry Coen in a Williams world premiere: The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde (September 18-19), described by the Beau Jest Moving Theatre as a “savage comedy” in the Grand Guignol vein. The production was commissioned by the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (September 24-27), where it will be reprised. Further highlights of the festival — whose theme this year is “The Fight for Life” — include Minneapolis’ Gremlin Theatre premiering The Enemy: Time; Betty Buckley reading Ghosts from a Summer Hotel; festival curator David Kaplan directing Chicago’s National Pastime Theatre in The Day on Which a Man Dies; an homage by protégé playwright Lanford Wilson; and a “21 Gun Salute” by ingenious local performance artist Jay Critchley.
Elsewhere on the Cape and Islands, the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre mounts David Hare’s The Blue Room (September 10-October 4), while the amazing Andre De Shields performs his solo show Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: From Douglass to Deliverance at the Yard in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard (September 4-7).
The Berkshires are still hopping. Something of a graduation ceremony for William Finn’s Musical Theatre Lab, Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists You Probably Don’t Know, But Should… (September 4-6) is an eagerly awaited annual event at the Barrington Stage Company. Also exciting, and running in tandem: Memory Is the Mother of All Wisdom (September 5-6), a tragicomic new musical by Sara Cooper and Zachary Redler, about an estranged daughter (Leslie Kritzer) who moves back home to take care of her Alzheimer’s-addled mother (Catherine Cox).
Shakespeare & Company’s 15th annual Studio Festival of Plays (September 7) will feature readings of seven works, including Campbell Scott in Edward Albee’s The Goat, Or, Who Is Sylvia? S&Co will also present the American premiere of a three-man Hound of the Baskervilles, adapted by Steven Canny and John Nicholson as a Victorian spoof (September 26-November 8). The baseball leitmotif resurfaces at the Berkshire Theatre Festival with Andrew Guerdat’s Red Remembers (September 11-November 1), in which David Garrison plays Red Barber, former announcer for both the Dodgers and the Yankees, as he muses on his career and the beauty of the game.
