Post Script

In his 1967 review of the Audrey Hepburn movie, “Wait Until Dark,” legendary film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the classic thriller, about a blind woman being terrorized by three conmen, depends on what he coined “an idiot plot.” Ebert summarized it as “one or more characters being idiots. They get trapped in a situation that they could easily get out of with common sense. But they don’t, being idiots. If they did, they’d solve the problem and the movie would be over.”

The term “sexual predator” is all over the news of late, but more than a century ago August Strindberg created a character even more powerful and terrifying — the sexually charged “psychic murderer.” In his 1887 essay of the same name, the Swedish playwright described a type of sexual warfare where the winner could, through intellect and sheer force of will, “coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission.”

In a French provincial town, two friends are meeting in an outdoor café for a drink when suddenly a rhinoceros stampedes through the village square.

Naturally the friends abruptly stop talking. Shopkeepers and villages gather around to gawk. But instead of alarm or distress at the intrusion of the enormous beast, all the crowd can muster is, “Well, of all things.” A slightly more eloquent version of, “huh,” this clichéd expression so encapsulates the public’s passive response to a clear threat, it occurs in the play 26 times.

As a kid, it was always a treat to catch the 1968 movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on TV—once a year, or so. (This was long before VCRs or DVDs.) Between primetime showings, I kept the vinyl record of the soundtrack in heavy rotation on my parents’ stereo, along with Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and other classics of the era.

Playwright Paula Vogel has an Obie Award for lifetime achievement, a Pulitzer Prize for her play How I Learned to Drive, and a place in the American Theater Hall of Fame. Vogel also enjoyed her Broadway debut earlier this year with an acclaimed production of Indecent, which earned three Tony nominations. Two decades earlier, she wrote one of the most creative and compelling plays about the AIDS crisis, The Baltimore Waltz.

Halfway through the first act of Thornton Wilder’s classic drama Our Town, the Stage Manager announces that a new bank is being built in Grover’s Corners. He asks the audience what they should put in the cornerstone of the building so that people a thousand years in the future will know something about those who populate the little New Hampshire town in 1903.

Shakespeare’s classic tale, Romeo and Juliet, has inspired a myriad of artists to interpret the tragic story into different media; books, movies, paintings, operas, symphonies, and ballets, among others. Distinguished Canadian dance company Cas Public will present their own take on the lovers caught between feuding families in Symphonie Dramatique, at Overture Center on October 20th in the Capitol Theater.

Madison’s Overture Center is only the second stop for the national tour of the Broadway hit A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, which racked up ten Tony nominations in 2014 and came home with four trophies, including the Tony for Best Musical. Part silly British farce, part throwback to old English music halls, it’s a story with a charming and unlikely serial killer as the protagonist. The production also features a very strong ensemble, a gorgeous, light operetta score, and a lot of clever stagecraft that lends great theatricality to the evening.

There is a theory that great writers lean heavily on their unhappy childhoods to create their art, and there are some notable examples that prove the rule. Stephen King’s early years make his novels look like a picnic in the park. Certainly Eugene O’Neill’s fraught family dynamics led to his greatest work; A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Tracy Letts has admitted that he based much of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play August: Osage County on his own childhood memories. And Edward Albee revealed that several of the characters in A Delicate Balance are based on members of his adopted family. They’ve each done us a great service in allowing us to be voyeurs in their miserable homes, instead of asking us to join them for dinner. To peek into the manipulations and machinations at work in the Albee household, see Strollers Theatre’s well constructed A Delicate Balance, on the Evjue Stage in the Bartell, through September 30th.

There are so many stories about 9/11. 

It's been 16 years since that fateful September 11th, and I still remember how blue the sky was. In fact it seems like each anniversary day has identicial weather -- a brilliant, clear blue sky, bright sun, a slight chill in the air hinting that fall is right around the corner. And of course I remember looking up at that sky reflexively as I drove to work in 2001, listening to a special report on NPR that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and wondering how a pilot could possibly make such a navigational error on such a bright, clear day. 

Then everyone listened to the news for the rest of the day, as the horrifying events unfolded.