Author Archives: Charlotte Asmuth
Bust at The Studio Theatre
Self-aggrandizing shtick or self-deprecating brilliance? Viewers might be divided over Bust, former Daily Show correspondent Lauren Weedman’s take on her stint volunteering at a Los Angeles women’s prison. She rolls in forty-five minutes late to her first volunteer meeting at the prison after talking a friend’s ear off on the phone about a recent night involving a guy, a bathroom and a “teeny, tiny bit of coke.” Continue reading
The Madman and the Nun at Ambassador Theater
As soon as you enter the lobby, you are immersed in what appears to be an art exhibit — yes, you are in the right place — and invited to peruse programs in the guise of medical files. The theatrical experiment begins fittingly early for Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s The Madman and the Nun, in which Dr. Bidello (a dementedly overdramatic Ivan Zizek) is only too eager to pawn his job of curing a deranged poet, Walpurg (John Stange), off on an unlucky nun and a freewheeling psychiatrist. Continue reading
A Bright New Boise at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
If you read anything these days, on the internet or otherwise, you’ll find that America is declining, downsizing and generally muddling through a recession. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is devoting this season to staging plays that explore the following question: … Continue reading
after the quake at Rorschach Theatre
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” is Joan Didion’s opening sentence in The White Album and, in the case of the protagonist of after the quake, Frank Galati’s adaptation of several Haruki Murakami stories, this is quite literally … Continue reading
Fringe Review: Apocalypse Story
If you put two horny guys in a room with a girl, the story doesn’t get any more nuanced – even if it is The Apocalypse. Kevin Brotzman’s play, directed by Marshall Garrett, features some talented actors with great comedic … Continue reading
Fringe Review: Cry of the Mountain
Adelind Horan has tackled the subject of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and the effects it has on residents, scientists and other key players in the coal industry, and her one-woman show is complete with chocolate chip cookies and live banjo … Continue reading
Fringe Review: Logic, Luck and Love
Logic, Luck and Love features local storytellers Kevin Boggs, Dustin Fisher, Molly Kelly and Jennifer Moore as themselves, ruminating on that thing we call love. Dustin Fisher has relationships down to a science, calculating that the compatibility odds are one … Continue reading
Fringe Review: Caught in Dante’s Fifth: Caught in Dante’s Fifth: The Naked Truth of Kindred Spirits
Stephen J Productions’ Caught in Dante’s Fifth… has plenty of full-frontal male nudity and tossing around of the ‘N’ word in it but, strangely, it is neither titillating nor edgy. This slapdash, pedantic rant, delivered by Jameson Freeman as a … Continue reading
Fringe Review: Insurgent Sonata
Perhaps I might be toeing a critical boundary here, but I’ll say it anyway: I believe in this play. Local playwright Timothy J. Guillot’s play (directed by Joe Banno) is a rare gift. Five brave, young actors portray teenagers attempting … Continue reading
The Wind in the Willows at Imagination Stage
Mr. Toad is that friend who constantly has the next great idea and can’t seem to stick with one obsession for long. As Toad, Sasha Olinick is a force to be reckoned with. His eyes glaze over as he leaps … Continue reading
the shape of things at The Colonial Players
As the lights come up for a brief intermission, the woman next to me sighs heavily to her companion: “I’m sick of these people.” Neil LaBute would be proud. His play the shape of things, directed by Gary Seddon, is … Continue reading
Opus at Olney Theatre Center
Playwright Michael Hollinger trained as a classical musician before concentrating on Theatre in graduate school where, he writes, he “made the mistress an honest woman.” Opus, which received Philadelphia’s Barrymore Award in 2006 for Outstanding New Play, is Hollinger’s love … Continue reading
