The government doesn’t dole out hope. Hope is not an entitlement program. Resonating with surprising strength to the nation’s current political predicament, the prescience of despair in Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms is striking despite being penned over a quarter of a century ago for a war-torn time even further behind us. Appearing as the non-musical offering in the Kensington Arts Theatre’s 2016/2017 season, Two Rooms is a battlefield of emotional carnage,
It’s a rare treat for a reviewer to be able to praise a performance as “robotic”. Caity Brown magnificently straddles the line between android and human in McLean Community Players production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential.
Brown plays Jacie, a young female robot in a world where actors have been replaced by “actoid” acting units. This charmingly absurd proposition sets up a delicate challenge for Brown, who must be convincing simultaneously as a machine but also as somebody who has lived a thousand lives of intense human emotion —
Misery. Grief. Despair. These are the ailments with which English housewife Charlotte Wilson finds herself plagued in the suffocating confines of dreary, rainy London. She needs a break. She needs to bring purpose into her life, which she feels like she is fast losing. One day, as she is contemplating this, she reads an advertisement in the paper, and Charlotte Wilton finds herself swept up in the enchantment of an up-for-rent village on the coast of Italy,