Tag Archives: Gregg Weiner
After a half-century of sympathetic portraits of Hedda Gabler as a woman suffocating in a sexist societal straightjacket, Miami Theater Center gives us a cool, manipulative, self-centered creature whose primary complaint is she’s bored.
The magic of serendipity: It’s difficult to imagine — without being boxed into it as Miami Theater Company was — how an artistic director would thematically put together a season encompassing Hedda Gabler and The Seven Year Itch.
Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale at GableStage focuses on a morbidly obese man wanting to reconnect with his abandoned daughter before his imminent death. But the darkly funny and affecting play — awash in profanity, cynicism, alienation and fatalism — reveals itself to be about hope rooted in the innate decency inside scalded souls.
A five-foot tall assembly of beige bags hangs in the corner of Gablestage’s cramped communal dressing room, vaguely shaped like a tan version of the marshmallow monster from Ghostbusters. No one has yet christened this fat suit created for The Whale, but even without actor Gregg Weiner inside it, it feels like it’s a character.
Scott and Hem, an imagined reunion of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, is half comprised of deadly accurate insights into the angst of creative souls; the other half is just deadly dumps of name-dropping and exposition. A talented cast and director struggle to make the play at Actors Playhouse land solidly, and sometimes they succeed, but not always.
The snowbirds have gone home, but South Florida theater never seems to go dark these days. This year-round trend has never been clearer than right now with a calendar is jammed with an overwhelming cornucopia of options over the next two or three weeks. Here’s an incomplete overview:
Plenty of laughter greets every witticism and absurdity in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Dividing The Estate, Horton Foote’s acidic depiction of greed, jealousy and family. But through the laughter, you either silently thank God you don’t know these people or you curse fate that they are way too familiar.
Put Actors’ Playhouse production of Making God Laugh pretty much in the insightful column. Playwright Sean Grennan uses our recognition of the laughter and pain common to most familial relationships and uses it as a building block in his farcical comedy that transmutes into poignant drama.
If you wonder what theater was like back when it was as popular as film and far more influential than the upstart television, you can see a prime example in the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s time machine production of the 1952 potboiler Dial M For Murder.
Playwright Jessica Farr and director Paul Tei create a fever dream in Mad Cat Theatre Company’s Blow Me, depicting a tragic death spiral, relieved by copious droll dancing-at-your-funeral epigrams tossed off by Blow and her coterie like a latter day Algonquin Round Table, featuring a bravura performance by Erin Joy Schmidt.