Theater

Play by play: March 6, 2009

Plays from A to Z

By CAROLYN CLAY | March 3, 2009

BLACKBIRD | David Harrower's play won the 2007 Olivier Award for Best New Play (beating out Rock 'n' Roll, The Seafarer, and Frost/Nixon), and now SpeakEasy Stage Company presents its area premiere, with Elliot Norton Award winner David R. Gammons directing. Sixteen years earlier, as we find out almost a third of the way into the 90 minutes, the 40-year-old Ray, after a long flirtation, took the 12-year-old Una to an inn, where they had sex. Ashamed, he left her there alone. Now the two of them have met up in Ray's office in an industrial building, and their shifting stories of what happened make for shifting emotional sands — for them, as well as for us. This is a crack production: Bates Wilder and Marianne Bassham do a sterling job with the spare, half-sentence dialogue that has its roots in Pinter and Mamet, and Gammons is Boston's master of ultra-violence. | Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston | Through March 21 | Curtain 7:30 pm Tues [March 17] | 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | 3 pm Sun | $47-$50; $42-$45 students, seniors; $30 gallery seats; $14 student rush, with ID, one hour before curtain, subject to availability

A BLESSING AND A CURSE: A DUET OF PLAYS ON MOTHERHOOD | Spiced Wine Productions is the force behind the world premiere of this double bill of one-acts by area playwright Ginger Lazarus. Fran Weinberg directs Benny and Serena's High School Graduation, a bittersweet comedy about a mom struggling to do what's best as her valedictorian son leaves the nest, and Mary, "a wild spin on one of the most famous mothers of all time" in which the mother of God is preparing to save the world when an angel appears with the offer of an entirely new mission. | Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Comm Ave, Boston | 866.811.4111 | March 6-15 | Curtain 8 pm Thurs-Sat | 2 + 7 pm Sun | $20; $15 students, seniors

BLUE MAN GROUP | The Drama Desk Award–winning trio of cobalt-painted bald pates begin their delightful and deafening evening of anti–performance art beating drums that are also deep buckets of paint, so that sprays of color jump from the instruments like breaking surf, and end by engulfing the spectators in tangles of toilet paper. | Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton St, Boston | 617.931.ARTS | Indefinitely | Curtain 8 pm Wed [March 25] | 8 pm Thurs | 7 pm Fri | 4 + 7 + 10 pm Sat | 1 + 4 pm Sun | $48-$62; $30 student rush

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF | Scott Edmiston directs this solid, sparking Lyric Stage Company revival of Tennessee Williams's 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner set on the Mississippi plantation where Big Daddy is about to buy the farm and Maggie the Cat, rejected by the pickled husband who hates her, is jumping out of her sexual skin. Lyric honcho Spiro Veloudos, returning to the stage after a number of years, is a surprisingly humane if still vigorously crude, "mendacity"-drubbing Big Daddy, and Georgia Lyman is a determined, febrile, and suitably feline Maggie. | Lyric Stage Company of Boston, 140 Clarendon St, Boston | 617.585.5678 | Through March 14 | Curtain 7:30 pm Wed-Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 4 + 8 pm Sat | 3 pm Sun | $25-$50

CORIOLANUS | Robert Walsh directs this Actors' Shakespeare Project staging of the Bard's political tragedy about on a Roman war hero who must choose between his pride and his loyalty to Rome (and his mother). Benjamin Evett and Bobbie Steinbach head the cast. "The high-voltage conflicts in the production will be underscored by percussion designer Stephen Serwacki, a former member of the Stomp cast, who will use a variety of unconventional instruments to create the play's sense of violence and chaos." | Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Ave, Somerville | 866.811.4111 | March 12–April 5 | 7:30 pm Thurs-Sat | 2 pm Sun | $25-$47; $20-$30 March 12, 13 previews

DARK PLAY OR STORIES FOR BOYS | Apollinaire Theatre Company presents the area premiere of Carlos Murillo's work, which debuted at the 2007 Humana Festival for New American Plays. Inspired by real-life events in Manchester, England, it's about a 14-year-old boy who comes across a naively worded Internet ad posted by a 16-year-old boy who wants to fall in love. "Already bored with cyber-sex and posting fake on-line ads, Nick invents the girl of Adam's dreams, Rachel, and Adam and Rachel fall hard." Mayhem ensues. Danielle Fauteux Jacques directs. | Chelsea Theatre Works, 189 Winnisimmet St, Chelsea | 617.887.2336 | Through March 22 | Curtain 8 pm Fri-Sat | 3 pm Sun [no March 8] | $18 in advance; $20 at the door; $15 student rush

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ARTICLES BY CAROLYN CLAY

TWIN PEAKS | August 12, 2009
The bay of Ephesus laps Collins Avenue in Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's Latin-tinged, frisky if over-frenetic The Comedy of Errors (at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 16). It is not across sands of subtlety but through a spray of salsa that the perpetrators of this 1930s-South-Beach-set riff on Shakespeare's early comedy pratfall.

SEASONS' GREETINGS | August 04, 2009
It may not be December 1963, but oh what a night is Jersey Boys (at the Shubert Theatre through September 26) for boomers wishing to enjoy the soundtrack of their youth set against a mix of Forever Plaid and GoodFellas .

HARE BELLES | July 28, 2009
With apologies to Winston Churchill, The Breath of Life is a cliché wrapped in an enigma — or two. On the face of it, award-winning British writer David Hare's ruthless yet sentimental two-hander (at Gloucester Stage through August 2) is a standard confrontation between a betrayed wife and her husband's long-time mistress.

QUAKE AND SHAKE | July 22, 2009
A tenderhearted yarn spinner tells an anxious little girl a story about a talking bear hawking honey. A nerdy young debt collector comes home to find a six-foot amphibian bent on recruiting him to save Tokyo from a natural disaster. Both scenarios emanate from the brain of award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

VIOLET HOUR | June 23, 2009
The color purple describes both kids' icon Barney and a bruise. And sure enough, both child-friendly uplift and florid abrasion are wound into the sprawling, heartfelt musical based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer-winning 1982 novel about a beaten-down young black woman learning to value herself over the course of 40 years in the first half of the 20th century.

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