“In the Penal Colony” is not a play that you can fully absorb minutes after the curtain closes. This is a play that sinks in to your skin and stays there. A play that you feel before you even know why. Twenty-four hours after seeing the show, there are still things that I am working to uncover.
Read MorePlaywright Madeleine George sets her “Hurricane Diane” in an Early Anthropocene Time, the era defined as “the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.” Most, except members of the current Administration, see that influence to have been deleterious at best and are aware of the dire predictions for Planet Earth’s future viability unless this human activity is modified speedily and thoroughly. The effects of climate change are as evident now as they were when Ms. George’s play had its debut at Two River Theatre in New Jersey in 2017. Perhaps even more so. So why does New York Theatre Workshop team up with Women’s Project Theater to resurrect this problematic play?
Read MoreBeartrice Albans (a resolute and Machiavellian Lynda Gravátt) spent her life under the oppressive laws that governed people of color in the colony of Louisiana. Specifically, she was Lazare’s placée a status that allows her as a woman of color to set up common law households with a white man to circumvent legal prohibitions. Beartrice’s mother signed the papers that placed the young woman into this form of indentured servitude. Lazare, of course, was married to a white woman although he and Beartrice had three daughters together. In “The House That Will Not Stand” at New York Theatre Workshop, Marcus Gardley examines what happens to Beartrice and her daughters when Lazare dies (mysteriously) and new American laws – post Louisiana Purchase in 1813 – threaten to leave them homeless and living in poverty. Is there any chance of survival for the house Beartrice “built” during her time with Lazare?
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