Tag Archives: Zachary Eisenstat

Jun 02

A Robust Spectacle: THE TEMPEST

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Photo: The Smith Center/Geri Kodey

Photo: The Smith Center/Geri Kodey

Presented by the American Repertory Theatre
By William Shakespeare
Adapted and Directed by Aaron Posner and Teller
Magic by Teller
Songs by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Choreography by Matt Kent, Pilobolus
Magic Design by Johnny Thompson
Magic Engineering and Construction by Thom Rubino
Music Direction and Arrangements by Shaina Taub

May 11th – June 15th
Cambridge, MA

Reviews by Craig Idlebrook and Clara Idlebrook

(Editorial note – Reviewer Craig Idlebrook attended The Tempest with his family. The American Repertory Theatre asked that he include his 8-year-old daughter’s take on the show. Clara Idlebrook’s review appears below Craig’s.)

Craig’s Take:

There is something so delicious about watching artists at work who have mastered their craft enough to disregard public opinion and create something exquisitely weird. American Repertory Theatre’s staging of the Tempest feels like a transcendent late-night jam session between William Shakespeare, veteran magician Teller, and musical sabotage specialists Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. You could picture this production being a traveling troupe’s one-shot staging done during a layover, and someone happened to hit the record button on an iPhone. Continue reading →

Mar 25

Drama Gives the Power to Civilize Convicts in “Our Country’s Good”

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With Jennifer OConnor, Mac Young and Lynn R Guerra; Photos by Chris McKenzie

Presented by Whistler in the Dark Theatre

by Timberlake Wertenbaker
directed by Meg Taintor

March 15-April 6th
The Charlestown Working Theater
Charlestown, MA 02129
Whistler in the Dark Theatre Facebook Page

Review by Gillian Daniels

(Charlestown) Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good is not about the importance of plays but the importance of fiction—dreams, ambitions, and fantasies—to the downtrodden.  The convicts sent to the Australian penal colonies in 1788 have been dehumanized chiefly by circumstance.  The play the officers have the felons put on gives them the dignity they could not find in lives led as thieves and prostitutes in England.  The whole thing is an impressive meditation on how art fiercely alters perspective even if The Charlestown Working Theater’s production suffers peculiar pacing and lingering pauses. Continue reading →

Nov 03

Trapped by the Words: THE CHOSEN

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Photo by Timothy Dunn

Adapted by Aaron Posner & Chaim Potok
Directed by Daniel Gidron

presented by The Lyric Stage Company
140 Clarendon Street
Boston, MA
October 19th – November 17th, 2012

Lyric Stage Company Facebook Page

Review by Craig Idlebrook

(Boston) Adapting a novel to the stage can be a wrenching exercise. Pages upon pages of description, of scene, of setting, of theme must be boiled down to dialogue and action that can stand alone. By all accounts, Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen is considered a richly-layered and well-written story about the tension between Jewish communities, as told through the friendship of two young men who find themselves caught between the secular and religious communities at the dawn of Zionism. Unfortunately, he and co-writer Aaron Posner fail to adapt the novel to a script form, leaving in a narrator who breaks up the scenes and explains away the heartfelt tension between the characters, leaving us with a broken dialogue that tells an incomplete tale about the weight one must bear when one is called to carry the load of doing good. Continue reading →

Mar 15

The Play About The Baby – Or Is It?

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Lynn R. Guerra (Girl), Janelle Mills (Woman), Bob Mussett (Man), Zachary Eisenstat (Boy). Photo Credit: Alison Naturale

The Play About The Baby by Edward Albee, Exquisite Corps Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre, 3/7/12-3/31/12, http://www.exquisitecorps.org/.  Contains nudity.

(Boston, MA) Innocence and responsibility intertwine with reality and absurdity in Exquisite Corps Theatre’s production of The Play About The Baby.  A young couple, known only as boy and girl, explore their relationship as they bring new life into the world.  Through wicked twists and turns the couple spend their time trying to be intimate while they are constantly interrupted, first by the baby and then by a man and woman who act as a cross between social anthropologists and time-share sales people (although no time-shares were sold in the making of this play). Continue reading →