Articles Tagged With: Lisa Hill-Corley

Doctor Faustus at Brave Spirits Theatre

Reviews November 2, 2017 Joshua Engel

Charlene V. Smith bookends Doctor Faustus with two magnificent, and very different, speeches. She begins with arrogance borne of intelligence, full of both wit and ennui, seeking greener pastures beyond this world. She ends broken, despairing, hopeless, crying out to heaven and hell. Her performance as Joan Faustus is insightful and incisive, precise and passionate.

The bridge between the two is Hollis Evey as Mephistopheles, who grants Faustus her every worldly wish in exchange for the immortal soul that Joan doesn’t believe she has.

The Incest Rep: Tis Pity She’s a Whore at Brave Spirits Theatre

Reviews April 6, 2017 Joshua Engel

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,

Review: Henry V at The Rude Mechanicals

Reviews September 1, 2016 Amanda N. Gunther

Suppose within the girdles of the Greenbelt Arts Center’s walls are now confined two mighty forces— The Rude Mechanicals: a community theatre troupe that delivers judiciously trimmed and readily accessible Shakespearean plays— and Henry V: Shakespeare’s middle Henry history play. Directed by Rebecca Speas, this muse of fire finds its place among the Bard’s canon in true Rude Mechanicals style and delivers swiftly the plot, the point, and the perfectly pared-down rendition of what is otherwise a lengthy history lesson in the trajectory arc of Prince Hal to King Harry.

Review: Henri IV Part II at Brave Spirits Theatre

Reviews November 8, 2015 Joshua Engel

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,

Review: Henri IV Part I at Brave Spirits Theatre

Reviews October 31, 2015 Joshua Engel

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.

Review: The Life and Death of King John at The Rude Mechanicals

Reviews August 25, 2015 Amanda N. Gunther

Ne’er so bethump’d with words has this critic found herself when staring down an amalgamation of a Shakespearean remount dipped in Pythonian humor and sprayed liberally with truncation across the Greenbelt Arts Center’s intimate black box stage, than she has in this very moment in attempting to report upon The Life and Death of King John as presented by The Rude Mechanicals. A history most boring upended ass over tea-kettle by Director Alan Duda,

Review: Julius Caesar at The Rude Mechanicals

Reviews January 8, 2015 Amanda N. Gunther

Friends! Romans! Washingtonians! The time has come to take a stand against the inconstant shifting nature of theatre in Washington DC! Hail The Rude Mechanicals and their rebellious production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Directed by company founder Jaki Demarest, this scandalous production takes the great Roman Empire to 1920’s soviet occupied Russia. Stalin, proletariat, rebellion; all encompassed in Demarest’s revolutionary vision of one of the Bard’s milder tragedies.

With honor in one eye and death in the other,

The Vagina Monologues at Greenbelt Arts Center

Reviews January 27, 2014 Amanda N. Gunther

What would your vagina say if it could talk? Mine would say that you need to go see the Rude Mechanicals and their production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues at the Greenbelt Art Center. Co-Directed by Lauren Beward and Jaki Demarest, this particular production of the iconic feminist piece is defying the standards of which the original was formed with and setting the benchmark extremely high for all future productions.