“What makes me a Christian to you, makes you a Jew to me.” So says the title character in Nathan the Wise, directed by Adam Immerwahr. Originally written in the 18th century as a morality play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Michael Bloom has written this adaptation making its world premiere. A morality play can have a tough line to walk, especially to a modern audience – to be empathetic and entertaining without being moralizing and pat –
The real King John of England has a murky reputation. We know him for the Magna Carta. We know him as a villain from the tales of Robin Hood. And, at a stretch, we know him as Shakespeare’s earliest monarch, chronologically. Folger Theatre capitalizes on a chance to tell the rarely-told tale of this questionable king in its current production of Shakespeare’s King John, directed by Aaron Posner.
As the Folger describes,
He that loves to be flattered with worthy of the flattery. What if that being flattered is deserving of the flattery? Are they too then still worthy of the flattery? Perhaps even more so! Folger Theatre, in particular Director Robert Richmond, deserves a great deal of flattery for the current production of Timon of Athens, closing out the 2016/2017 season upon the stage inside the great Folger Shakespeare Library. Under Robert Richmond’s judiciously rendered vision and modernization,
We are not animals. We are watching. But what if we are animals and are not to be trusted? Forum Theatre brings to the stage in a fully immersive and unapologetically evocative experience Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. Directed by Yury Urnov, this deceptively dark drama and majestically macabre tale unfolds in a surreal reality that is simultaneously in the audience’s periphery and just outside of their vision. Remarkably experiential, as the audience is quite literally the on-looking totalitarian dictatorship masses,