In the wake of the Great Recession, "You Can't Take It With You" still hits home and still provokes a lot of good laughs, a point reiterated by Everyman Theatre's revival of the 1936 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy.

Come to think of it, the piece might be even more relevant, given how so many of today's one-percenters act like they truly believe they can take it with them.

There remains something deliciously radical about the characters who inhabit the New York home of the elderly Martin Vanderhof, he of the whatever-makes-you-happy school of philosophy. They all do what most of us can only fantasize about -- quit jobs, plunge into hobbies (even making fireworks in the basement), get all communal with friends and quickly friended strangers, talk back to the IRS, not give a hoot what other people think.

Of course, life can't really be like this, right? The subtly subversive power of the play comes from the way it keeps making you doubt that, keeps shifting the parameters of normality.

In the much-extended Vanderhof household, time doesn't matter as much as how you fill it. And the way they fill it is fundamentally, blissfully selfish, yet, somehow, within a caring environment. How cool is that?

The Everyman production, directed by Vincent Lancisi, comes in ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

There’s no mistaking a strong new voice in theater, someone who surprises and challenges, who creates fresh ways to examine familiar issues.

Tarell Alvin McCraney emerged a few years ago as such a voice when, still in his 20s, he unveiled a trilogy of plays set in the Louisiana bayou and loosely based on Yoruban mythology of West Africa.

The second of these pieces, “The Brothers Size” from 2007, has been particularly well-received in stagings across the country and abroad. It is now at Everyman Theatre in a searing production that hits you with a double, equal force — the imagination of the writing, and the power of the performers.

At its heart, the play is about the bonds of family, how they can go much deeper than we will ever know until they are threatened. Sibling attachments are hardly unexplored in drama. What McCraney does so well is ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Michael Weller’s recent drama “Fifty Words” focuses unflinchingly on a married couple, Jan and Adam, who have to face something formidable in their Brooklyn brownstone — a night entirely alone.

It’s the first such night since their son was born nine years earlier; the boy, having finally made a friend, is away on a sleep-over. This leaves the parents with a lot of time, if not each other, to kill.

Adam, a moderately successful architect, decides an amorous romp with his wife is in order, before he has to leave for another business trip in the morning. But Jan seems terribly preoccupied, both with left-over work related to her start-up business and with her absent child, who has developed a distinctive way of hiding under his own troubles.

Before long, the spring-loaded spouses uncover any number of suspicions, resentments and long-avoided truths.

“It’ll sting; I can’t help that,” Adam says to Jan at one point, treating a fresh cut on her foot after one of their rounds.

That’s nothing compared to the emotional wounds inflicted on both people before the night is over, more wounds than could ever properly heal. Recalling earlier conflicts, Adam tells his wife: “We were just learning how to hurt each other back then. We were amateurs.”

They are professionals now.

Everyone knows some seemingly incompatible mates who are nonetheless bound together. Marriages can be complex, as theater-goers already know well from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” In that drama, George and Martha reveal an uncanny ability to goad and ensnare each other. Their weapon — or refuge — of choice is booze, so much easier than sex.

For Adam and Jan, physical intimacy is the trap, and has been from the day they met. They have developed ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

The latest proof: Center Stage will present free public readings of two Martin McDonagh plays featuring members of Everyman Theatre and Single Carrot Theatre and other local actors.

How's that for collaboration within the arts community? Pretty cool.

The project provides a neat way for Center Stage to promote its production of one of McDonagh's "A Skull in Connemara," which opens next week.

The readings will focus on ...

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Categories: Center Stage, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre, Single Carrot Theatre
        

Everyman Theatre provides an opportunity to get better acquainted with the lyricist in its winter concert presentation, “Keep on the Sunny Side of the Street: A Tribute to Dorothy Fields,” which opens this week.

The cast includes Nancy Dolliver, James Gardiner, Katie Nigsch-Fairfax and Delores King Williams. Howard Breitbart is musical director.

Gardiner, the engaging singer and actor who has appeared in Everyman’s Irving Berlin celebration a few seasons ago, wrote the book for this year’s salute.

“When I tell people I’m doing a show about Dorothy Fields, they go ‘Dorothy who?’ But mention ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street,’ and they go, ‘Oh, yeah,’” Gardiner said. “She doesn’t have the name recognition of Ira Gershwin or Irving Berlin, but she definitely was one of the best lyricists in the 20th century.”

Born in 1904 in New Jersey, Fields enjoyed a long career that produced more than 400 songs, from such standards as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” in 1928 to “Big Spender” from the hit musical “Sweet Charity” in 1966. She collaborated with a who’s-who of composers, from Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern to Cy Coleman and Quincy Jones.

That Fields could start in the business when she did says a lot.

“She was a female in what was kind of an all-boys club,” Gardiner said. “Her father even said to her, ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Clef Notes, Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

So Noel Coward reminds us in “Private Lives.” An antic revival of this 1930 comedy of bad manners is currently ripping up the boards at Everyman Theatre.

In a fast-paced three acts, Coward generates a clever, witty whirl from a simple set-up. At a seaside French hotel, Amanda and Elyot, now divorced, collide on their honeymoons with fresh spouses. It turns out that the old emotional bonds between the two were not as neatly severed as the legal ones.

The playwright, who often seems to be channeling Oscar Wilde in the quip department, skewers notions of romance, fidelity, compromise, sensitivity — you name it.

“Let’s be superficial and … enjoy the party as much as we can.” Elyot tells Amanda. Forget being sensible or serious. That’s “just what they want,” all those “futile moralists who try to make life unbearable.”

The more Elyot and Amanda thwart conventionality, ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Everyman Theatre's revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" opens this week, an event that made me think of the playwright himself as a perfect source for the latest Midweek Madness installment.

So here's dear Noel and one of his ever so witty songs as only he could deliver it, complete with impeccable diction and some divine gestures:

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Posted by Tim Smith at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Less than a year ago, Everyman Theatre presented a revival of a great American play, Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," with a tightly cohesive, exceptionally affecting cast and a note-perfect physical production to match.

Over the weekend, the company unveiled another revival of a great American play, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," with a tightly cohesive, exceptionally affecting cast and a note-perfect physical production to match.

Drawing upon all-too-real experiences in her own life, Hansberry fashioned a compelling drama of a family trying to fulfill personal dreams, as well as that elusive panacea known as the American dream.

The difference, an acute difference when "A Raisin in the Sun" premiered on Broadway in 1959, is that this family is black.

There is nothing remotely dated about the play. There is nothing manipulative about it, either. Half a century later, it feels fresh and real, still asks questions that sting, still refuses to provide pat answers.

Hansberry opens a window into the African American world with one hand, holds up a mirror to all of us with the other.

There are inevitable conflicts among family members over how the money should be spent. Things turn deeper and more unsettling when Lena, the recently widowed matriarch, introduces the prospect of a move into a home in a white neighborhood called Clybourne Park. (That's also the name of the recent, Pulitzer Prize-winning Bruce Norris play, a kind of sequel to the Hansberry classic. Perhaps that work will turn up before too long at Everyman.)

Why Lena makes her choice, and the way the family is affected by the turn of events, is the stuff of arresting drama, heightened by ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Funny how that notion was still so ingrained centuries later that George Bernard Shaw could have a gleefully evil time skewering it in his 1912 play "Pygmalion."

Here, the clash of classes creates a collision that shatters egos as brusquely as social barriers, all the while generating zingers, a la Oscar Wilde. This venerable comedy gets a brisk workout in a handsome production that brings down the curtain on Everyman Theatre's 20th anniversary season.

With a dash of Cinderella and a smidgen of Svengali, the plot of "Pygmalion" works on one level merely as an imaginative take-off on the ancient Greek tale of a sculptor falling in love with a statue that comes to life.

But there's also quite an undercoating to the play, where Shaw's socialist leanings can be detected, along with what might be thought of as at least almost-feminist viewpoints.

A lot gets said in "Pygmalion"; a lot is left unsaid. Most famously, there's the question of how much romantic spark, if any, is generated over the course of the action between phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl he turns into a faux-princess on a whim and a bet.

Thanks to "My Fair Lady," the decidedly romanticized musical version of the play, many folks ...

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Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Fittingly, that farewell to the old building will come in May/June 2012 with a staging of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart comic classic of family, society and politics,"You Can't Take It With You."

The season will open in September with a classic that strikes a very different note ...

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Posted by Tim Smith at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

I've been ever so feverishly trying to finish writing various other things today, but I didn't want you to think the blog had been turned off. So, while you're waiting for something brilliant to be posted here (no one has that much time, I know), feel free to check out my review of "Shooting Star" at Everyman Theatre.

If you happen to attend tonight's performance, you might well experience a rare case of nature imitating art -- snowfall is very much a part of the plot, and very much a visual element in this finely-acted production.

Posted by Tim Smith at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Everyman's staging of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," originally scheduled to close Dec. 12, will now go through Dec. 18.

Vincent Lancisi directs an exceptional cast in an illuminating production of this still-potent American play, providing quite a lesson in ensemble acting and subtly atmospheric scenic design. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Arena Stage is celebrating its appealingly renovated facility with a vibrant revival of the venerable Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma." The production was to have closed Dec. 26, but

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Posted by Tim Smith at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre
        

Keller, grippingly portrayed by Carl Schurr in Everyman Theatre’s sterling production of this still-searing work from 1947, is supremely confident he can explain how defective aircraft parts left his factory and led to loss of life. Besides, he was officially exonerated.

He has lived his lie so boldly and thoroughly that it doesn’t really occur to him that the truth could ever emerge. Why should it? The war is over; so is the guilt. Everybody did things they shouldn’t have during those dark years, didn’t they?

Set in an unspecified American town, the play has hardly lost its relevance, certainly not in the age of Halliburton and BP, and its ability to touch the senses remains undiminished. Even those who know this work well may find themselves startled anew by how much of a gut-punch this tragedy can still deliver.

Miller keenly understood what brings families together, what drives them apart, and why it all matters. Everyman artistic director Vincent Lancisi Director is very much at home dealing with such familial issues, and his unforced, insightful directorial touch draws from the cast — most of them from the company's own family of resident artists — performances fully alive with nuance.

Schurr’s sureness as an actor enables him to reveal every facet of Keller’s volatile character as the center of gravity keeps shifting beneath him — the actor’s eyes convey as much as any of his lines. Most importantly, Schurr also finds in Keller the ruggedly appealing qualities that help to explain the loyalty of the man’s family, the affection of a neighborhood kid.

As Chris, the son who came back from the war and joined his father’s business, Clinton Brandhagen reveals

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Posted by Tim Smith at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Drama Queens, Everyman Theatre