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Review: Martyna Majok’s ‘Ironbound’ Encapsulates Struggle of a Polish Immigrant Woman

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Moxie Theatre is staging its first production the 2017-2018 season, Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound.” Directed by Jennifer Eve Thorn, “Ironbound” is a story about a Polish immigrant woman “for whom love is a luxury and a liability as she fights to survive in America,” as described in the program.

Set at a bus stop at night in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Jacque Wilke portrays the life of Darja from 1992 — shortly after she emigrated to the United States with her first husband Maks (Arusi Santi) — until 2014, when she deals with her unfaithful boyfriend Tommy (Eric Casalini), a letter carrier.

Using 2014 as a jumping-off point, the play’s narrative goes switches between defining moments in Darja’s relationships with her two husbands (only her first husband appears on stage), her son (who never appears on stage) and Tommy, her current boyfriend. Vic (Carter Piggee), a high school kid, who finds Darja at the bus stop after she has been beaten by her second husband, acts as a Good Samaritan.   [Read more…]

Staging Trust, Love and Healing: Karen Hartman’s ‘Roz and Ray’ at San Diego Repertory Theatre

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San Diego Repertory Theatre is presenting Karen Hartman’s Roz and Ray, directed by Delcia Turner Sonnenberg, featuring Carla Harting and Steven Lone, at the Lyceum Stage. Set in Hartman’s hometown, San Diego, Roz and Ray portrays two people who are personally and professionally involved in the controversial treatment of hemophilia. The play spans 15 years, from 1976 through 1987 and a single day in 1991.

The beginning scene takes place at Children’s Hospital in San Diego in 1976, when Roz Kagan, a brilliant and caring doctor, explains to Ray, a father of twin sons with hemophilia, about a cutting-edge blood transfusion treatment using freeze-dried powdered concentrates containing Factor 8 and 9. Roz is excited about this new treatment because the concentrates can be stored and administered at home, eliminating countless trips to the hospital to receive conventional full-blood transfusion treatment. In the 1980s however, it was found that Factor 8 and 9 concentrates contained tainted blood from donors with AIDS, leaving more than half of the hemophiliac population in the United States infected with HIV.   [Read more…]

Harry Dean Stanton: ‘Canción Mixteca’ Paris, Texas | Video Worth Watching

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R.I.P. Harry Dean Stanton (July 14, 1926 – September 15, 2017). Here’s Harry Dean Stanton singing the melancholy and wistful “Canción mixteca” from the movie “Paris, Texas”.   [Read more…]

What a Dump! or Is Donald Trump Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | Video Worth Watching

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Well it may not be set in the White House, but this little slice of the 1966 Mike Nichol’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” certainly does justice to the original Bette Davis delivery of the now iconic phrase: “What a dump”. What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump? As little as possible. I just couldn’t resist an opportunity to resurrect this masterful classic that is one of only two films to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards. (h/t AGD)   [Read more…]

Herbert Siguenza: Melding Cultures

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A state rich in Latino and Anglo cultures, California has always been a perfect stomping ground for Herbert Siguenza, the current Playwright in Residence at the San Diego Repertory Theater.

Siguenza has a gift of melding both cultures together and reaching a diverse audience. This is seen in his plays, “A Weekend with Pablo Picasso,” “El Henry,” “Manifest Destinitis,” and “Steal Heaven.” But Siguenza is more than just a playwright; he’s a performer and painter as well.   [Read more…]

Courage and Camaraderie During the Reign of Terror: Moxie Theatre Produces ‘The Revolutionists’

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When historical women gather on stage—like Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls—their creativity, wittiness, and diversity transform into dynamic energy. The Moxie Theatre production of Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists, directed by Jennifer Eve Thorn, exemplifies that transformation.

Set in Paris in 1793 at the beginning of the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), The Revolutionists portrays four women who played different roles in the French Revolution. The central figure is writer Olympe de Gouges, who championed equal rights for women in the French Republic and wrote plays and pamphlets as well as giving speeches including the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen.   [Read more…]

Collidescope 3.0: Adventures in Pre-and Post-Racial America

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In collaboration with Ping Chong and Talvin Wilks, the Department of Theatre and Dance at Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, North Carolina, staged Collidescope 3.0: Adventures in Pre-and Post-Racial America in February 2017 at the Tedford Stage. Written by Chong and Wilks and directed by Chong, Collidescope 3.0 uses movement, video projections, and a collaged and collided soundscape to explore black and white relations in American history. Set in a space ship, Collidescope 3.0’s characters are aliens who take an anthropological look at the human race in the United State from 1775 to the present.

In the prologue, a group of the aliens are examining the murder scene of Trayvon Martin. In contrast to this prologue, the epilogue presents a ritual of commemoration for all African Americans who have fallen victim to racially motivated violence.
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Race, Gender and Nostalgia: Lydia R. Diamond’s Play ‘Smart People’

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Arena Stage is presenting the Washington DC premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s Smart People at its Kreeger Theater. Directed by Seema Sueko, the show is filled with ricocheting words on race and gender stereotypes and their effects on different aspects of society in the United States. Set in the period from September 2007 to January 20, 2009, four “smart people” in Cambridge, Massachusetts unpack race and gender related issues in their professional and personal lives, politics, and economy in the times of optimism and hope.

The four characters are, in one way or the other, affiliated with Harvard University, an elite institution peopled by “smart people.” They are: Valerie Johnston, an aspiring and struggling African American actor (with an MFA degree in theatre); Brian White, a white professor of cognitive neuroscience; Ginny Yang, an Asian American (Chinese-Japanese American) professor of psychology, specializing in anxiety and depression among Asian American women, and counsellor; and Jackson Moore, an African American emergency room doctor who is in the process of getting a residency. During the course of the play, these characters encounter, begin relationships, and in some cases, experience their fallouts.   [Read more…]

Beyond the ‘Golden Gulag’: Film Screening and Panel Discussion at SDSU to Focus on Prison Abolition

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By Lydia P. Wood and James K. Anderson

Author and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore coined the term “Golden Gulag” in her 2007 book by the same name to label and critique what, despite destroying lives, has become a disturbingly normal way of life in the “Golden State” of California.

“I called my book ‘Golden Gulag,’” Gilmore says in the documentary film, “Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to a New Way of Life,” “in order to resonate with the images of totalitarian state incarceration … to emphasize that the ‘gulag’ is not simply a building with cages in it, but it is an entire way of life, an entire way of political and social and economic life. It extends from the places where prisoners come from to the places where prisons are built.   [Read more…]

Into the Beautiful North: A Play at the San Diego Repertory Theater

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I really wanted to love “Into the Beautiful North,” a new play at the SD Repertory Theater, especially because of its pedigree. It is based on the book by Luis Alberto Urea — it was the KPBS One Book San Diego for 2012 and one of Amazon’s Best Books 2015 — and was adapted by noted playwright, Karen Zacarias. It is directed by Sam Woodhouse and has a stellar cast, including one of my favorite performers, Herbert Siguenza. However, as I was watching the play, I felt like it had great potential, but hadn’t quite gotten there yet.

The play starts out in a small coastal village in the northern state of Sinaloa, Mexico, that is being threatened by “narcotraficantes.” All the men of the village have left for the United States to find work and send money back home.   [Read more…]

‘Dead Mall Walking’: A Film by Max Cheney

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By Morgan Proctor

In just 23 minutes, it emerges that the range of issues confronted in Dead Mall Walking clearly and remarkably belong there, and the story of the mall is an intricate and absorbing one of profit-driven planning, the abandonment of communities, and the quelling of radicalized space. Dead Mall Walking is a revelation of the complexity of the ordinary in the late capitalist landscape, where so much in decay is a surprisingly complete metaphor for the failure of consumption-based culture.   [Read more…]

Family Reconciliation in Twilight: World Premier of ‘Firepower’

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The Detroit Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of Firepower, written by Kermit Frazier and directed by Lynch Travis, explores the challenge of trust, honesty, respect, and love through the reunion of two generations of African American men.

Using the familiar structure of a family reunion and reconciliation, Firepower is packed with a number of issues and subjects from the history of the civil rights movement, racism and exploitation in American sports, search for and expression of identity, and the need for change toward further inclusion and diversity.   [Read more…]

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