author: Charles Boyington & Steven Kirkpatrick
Round House Theatre launches the premiere of Inda Craig-Galván’s play A Jumping-Off Point. It is a great launch and worth seeing! The new piece focuses on Leslie Wallace (Nikkole Salter), an African American writer newly hired to develop a series for HBO, whose personal victory is compromised by the return of Andrew (Danny Gavigan), a white man from her graduate school days, who accuses her of plagiarism.
The Vega household on Pike Street, on the lower east side of New York City, is a hectic walk-up on the eve of Hurricane Delores, the biggest potential disaster since Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. Devoted mother Evelyn is franticly attempting to arrange an emergency generator so her handicapped teen daughter Candi can continue to survive on her ventilator and life support equipment. The transport and emergency shelter services they offer were disastrous the last time during the devastation of Sandy.
The truth within a lie. Isn’t that a quaint little sentence that sums up Shakespeare or most of it at any rate? It is if you’re playwright Aaron Posner and you’ve been commissioned to step away from your exceedingly brilliant modern riffs on Chekhov and step into a variation on the Bard’s The Merchant of Venice. Closing out the 2015/2016 season at Folger Theatre, Posner’s latest world premiere District Merchants,
Theater J presents the brilliant and highly poignant new Aaron Posner play Life Sucks (Or the Present Ridiculous.) Written and subsequently Directed by Posner himself, this irreverent modern variation on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, is a gloriously thought-provoking work that captures the minds of the audiences through laughter, tears, and strange situations. This world premier work is quite possibly the most connective piece of work to address humans as they exist in the world;