When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
Terve! Or for those of you not familiar with the Voytto Prime vernacular, Welcome! InterAct Story Theatre hopes you will enjoy your stay on Voytto Prime, a super-cool, far-out, nifty space planet where all the latest gadgets are just a blink away! Artistic Director Ali Oliver-Krueger and Ben Kingsland have written a truly fantastical fable— Voytto Tech: A SciFi Fable. Sparklicious and full of interactive moments, the hallmark of any InterAct Story Theatre production,
For a world turned upside down as 2018, Director Charlene V. Smith has crafted a riveting, provocative, explosive Coriolanus. “Are we even capable of not harming ourselves?” she asks in the director’s notes, echoing Tori Boutin as citizen of Rome: “We willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will.”
Smith’s Rome is not a pinnacle of civilization. It’s violent and dirty, its citizens easily provoked to engage every whim.
Now is a time to speak, I harken! Can my heart consent to let my tongue throw out such words? Such words as Jacobean Comedy? Quizzically oxymoronic in its nature, the notion that something humorous came out of the era of brutal bloody tragedies often circling like flagrant vultures around things like depravity and incest is preposterous. Until you see A King and No King, appearing now as the lighter half of The Incest Rep at Brave Spirits Theatre.
Let’s face it: Parma is a nasty, nasty place. It’s got people cheating on their spouses, and plots of revenge, even before it gets all incesty. Which, of course, it does, this being part of Brave Spirits’ Incest Rep, along with A King and No King, by Beaumont and Fletcher. Those Jacobeans liked their plays dark, and that’s perfect to help Brave Spirits’ pledge of “Verse and Violence”.
The most available bachelorette in Parma is the beautiful Annabella,
Make Shakespeare gay again! The perfectly timed hangtag for Theatre Prometheus’ latest production from the Bard’s canon, [gay] Cymbeline. The company as a whole, though only entering their fourth year, lives up to their motto— “we bring the fire.” For not only do they boldly and daringly swap around the genders in William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to present a lesbian love story, but their judiciously rendered production actually makes the plot palatable and sensible!
Brave Spirits’ bold, ambitious, brilliant Henri IV continues its exploration of gender with Part II. Shakespeare often sadly limited the roles that women can play, both in their interactions with men and with each other. Brave Spirits asks, why can’t a woman be a Chief Justice or a drunken sot, a warrior or a tailor? Where Shakespeare occasionally explores ways for women to be women, Brave Spirits explores ways for women to be people,
Brave Spirits Theatre are brave spirits indeed. Henri IV is a vast, sprawling, powerful epic of a play. It ranges from intimate love scenes to political intrigue, battles of swords to battles of wits, comedy and tragedy and honor and cowardice. It takes an ambitious theater troupe to portray 67 characters with a dozen actors, and set a variety of different acting challenges. Brave Spirits has both ambition and the skill to achieve it.