A Spoonful of Wine Helps The Poison Go Down: Arsenic & Old Lace at Bowie Community Theare
author: Chris Pence
Don’t drink the wine at Bowie Community Theatre! Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 classic black comedy Arsenic & Old Lace follows Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who comes home to 1930’s Brooklyn to announce to his beloved Aunts Abby and Martha that he’s engaged to Elaine Harper,
Expectations are the hobgoblins of the complacent mind. Because nonsense is the new sense when Lewis Black is your playwright. Kicking off summer with a comedic offering, Bowie Community Theatre is retro-tripping back to the summer of 1981 with Lewis Black’s One Slight Hitch. Directed by Jennifer L. Franklin, this show has all the potential hallmarks of a farce and might even make you giggle.
The players do well with this script but the show is not without issues and the majority of those issues come from playwright Lewis Black.
As I watched this long-awaited production of August Wilson’s Fences from the Bowie Community Theatre (it was set to open in March 2020 before life got so much more… interesting), I couldn’t help recalling lines from Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”:
They f*ck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
As I
watched The Last Night of Ballyhoo, written by Alfred Uhry and directed
by Ilene Chalmers, at the Bowie Community Theatre, I had a thought somewhere during
Act I, Scene 4: “This play really is about something.” This is
not to say that I disliked the production before that; even before coming to
that revelation I would have acknowledged the stellar set and the faultless
performances from the cast.
Absolutely Dead, by
Michael Walker, is a rather difficult play for me to review. Whereas Ken
Kienas, director of the production currently running at the Bowie Community
Theatre, writes in his director’s note that he was floored upon reviewing the
play’s ending, I can’t say that my response was at all comparable — and, given
the overwhelming importance of the reveal to one’s impression of a
murder mystery, that had quite a bit to do with my overall opinion of the
production.
Bowie
Community Theatre is concluding its year of the woman with Deborah Brevoort’s The Women of Lockerbie Directed by
Estelle Miller, a fitting end to a season celebrating women. The play itself is
a nod to ancient Greek drama and a requiem for all the innocent lives lost on
PanAm Flight 103 and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. The production currently on stage at the
Bowie Playhouse is a tour-de-force performance of five spectacular female
thespians.
Women are strong. When most people think of war, the first image that comes to their mind is that of a man charging into battle. It wasn’t until last year that our military opened the doors for women to serve in combat roles. In spite of this, women serving in and alongside the military have faced the horrors of war just as valiantly men have, and they too have suffered the consequences of such violence.
How do you spend your summer? At the pool? In the sun at the beach? How about in your car driving down the highway? Becky’s New Car by Steven Dietz is a summer sensation performing now at Bowie Community Theatre and take my word for it – drive your car straight to the theatre in the woods and see this show! Bowie Community Theatre’s production is under the talented direction of Ilene Chalmers and has a tour de force cast of seven talented actors.
Just the name alone brings an image to the mind, Frankenstein. What did you picture? A large green man with stitches covering him and bolts in his neck? While that is the general depiction of Frankenstein in our society today, the reality is that the name actually belongs to the doctor that gave life and not to his creation. Though it could be said that Doctor Frankenstein himself is the monster all along, a thought that drives the current production of Frankenstein at the Bowie Playhouse.
Did you know that it’s less than 50 days until Christmas? It is. It is… And did you know that The Bowie Community Theatre is putting on their very own holiday production of A Tuna Christmas? They are! They are, yes they are. Directed bey Ken Kienas, this redneck holiday classic has some wild stereotypes that’ll give you the jingles all over your funny bone and just in time for the coming holiday season!
A lie is such a small betrayal. And a murder mystery can be such a grizzly arranged spectacle. Hold onto your hats and your sanity when it comes to Bowie Community Theatre’s latest offering to the stage— Lucille Fletcher’s Night Watch. A chilling suspense-driven drama, Directed by Randy Barth, this maddening thriller has all the hallmarks of Gaslight, all the decadence of Deathtrap and all the charm that such plays require to set the hairs at the back of your neck on edge.
Mistakes can happen even with the most organized and ordinary of people. The Tomb family are a far cry from ordinary. Almost a modern day Addams Family with all of the doom and gloom that shrouds their secrets, the six Tomb children are marvelously mad and delight in the accidentally intentional misfortune of visitors who arrive at their happy haunt. The marvelously maddened transform into mysterious murderers or murder victims as the bodies pile up faster than Dora can find room for them in her flowerbeds.
When one spends the greater part of their life in a fantasy world, there’s a great chance of slipping over completely and never finding one’s way back to reality. If the character’s that you’ve constructed inside that reality are entertaining enough to keep you there, that is. Bowie Community Theatre brings their 2015/2016 season to a close with Bernard Slade’s An Act of the Imagination. Directed by Patrick Gorirossi, this plot-twisted darkened stage thriller has a great deal of potential to entice an audience with Slade’s wicked good writing and the cameo characters that fill in the space between the pages.
The holidays are all about second chances, and Lord knows the Futrelle sisters are going to need a God’s honest Christmas miracle to make it to the New Year without killing each other and half of Fayro, Texas. Frankie’s overdue with a brand new set of twins, Honey Raye is trying to save the Christmas Eve program at the Tabernacle of the Lamb from going to hell in a holiday decorated handbasket, and Twink’s out of the clink for one night only on a count of good behavior at Christmas.
From the moment Kecia Campbell strides on stage as Sophie Washington in a plain, sensible dress and sturdy boots, toting a shotgun, Flyin’ West presents realistic, incisive portrayals of the women of color who settled the West in the 19th century. It’s set in the real-life town of Nicodemus, Kansas where newly-freed African Americans created a community following the Civil War. Presented by Bowie Community Theatre at The Bowie Playhouse and Directed by Estelle Miller,
It’s that time of year, folks! The Washington Area Theatre Community Honors have come around again to honor all of the truly exceptional theatre being performed in community venues across the Washington DC and surrounding metropolitan area. The 2014 award nominations were presented live this evening at The Birchmere in Alexandria, VA.
There were 111 different productions– 34 musicals and 77 plays– adjudicated over in the 2014 theatrical season. 31 community theatre companies participated in WATCH adjudication in 2014.