By James Foritano BOSTON - Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Letts knows his denizens of Chicago’s uptown. It’s the present, seedy but blossoming with ambiguous promise as a Starbuck opens just across the way from the down-at-the-heels, possibly on-the-way-out donut shop inherited and just barely animated by Arthur Przybyszewsky, played by Will Lebow. Arthur’s parents knew just who and just where they were when they immigrated to Chicago’s uptown from a devastated Poland as World War II came to a close. They were strivers in a land of opportunity where just riding the bus to your own business was a high. As a kid, Arthur was enfolded in this atmosphere of success and striving. Then came the 1950s and ‘60s. Arthur’s parents missed the ride, but Arthur was there in 1966 when Martin Luther King was pelted with firecrackers in Chicago’s Marquette Park. He was there when the Vietnam War … [Read more...] about Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston

By James Foritano Boston, MA - The action of Evan M. Weiner’s “Captors” at the Huntington Theatre Company’s B.U. Theatre takes place in May of 1960 somewhere on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The play documents the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents, his imprisonment in a safe house and his eventual transport to Israel for trial. The main conceit of the play is that agent Malkin is reliving the action in the safe house as he recounts it to the ghost writer of his memoirs, Cohn, 30 years after the Eichmann trial. Cohn, insisting on accuracy from his desk at stage right, often breaks into and freezes the action to question Malkin about the facts. Malkin at first endorses this quest for strict accuracy and then gradually comes to realize that all is not as cut and dried and as clear a history as Cohn and he would like it to be. Malkin is a fly by the … [Read more...] about Captors at the Huntington Theatre Company