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Artscope Magazine | January/February 2019

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Theatre

Yinka Shonibare’s “The American Library” installation at Cleveland Public Library’s Brett Hall.

REVIEW: FRONT INTERNATIONAL: CLEVELAND TRIENNIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

// Artscope Online, Audio/Visual, Exhibits, Movie, Theatre, Visual Arts

by Nancy Nesvet

The FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, which opened on July 14, presented a new take on art exhibitions in this nation. In Cleveland, a city with multiple art venues, Akron and Oberlin with art, history and spaces of their own, 110 artists at 28 locations, including a Frank Lloyd Wright house, two churches and one decommissioned steamship, presented film, video, installation, painting, sculpture, performance and community art. Open until September 30, each venue contributed to a critical mass of art in three Northeast Ohio cities. The brainchild of Frederick Bidwell, an art collector on the board of The Cleveland and Akron Art Museums, FRONT refers, he said, to the Erie lakefront that Cleveland embraces, and to its standing at the forefront of art in the region. Artistic director Michelle Grabner, a celebrated painter and professor at the Art Institute of … [Read more...] about REVIEW: FRONT INTERNATIONAL: CLEVELAND TRIENNIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Les Liaisons Dangereuses at Central Square Theater

// Artscope Online, Theatre

by James Foritano

“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Christopher Hampton currently playing at the Central Square Theater is based on the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, an army officer and aristocrat who saw action both on and off the battlefield in the heated days of the late 18th century, just before the French Revolution. A subtly deluxe staging and costume design puts one back in the day when love among the monied and titled French aristocracy was a blood sport, a hunt, a game of one-upmanship tempting to players of either gender.  It’s an age-old sport, love, however phrased, and this production though so far back in history, so above most of us in rarified social station translates pretty well — sometimes.  On the plus side the acting by the principle as well as the minor characters is always solid and sometimes heroic, violent emotions seizing not only pretty faces but the whole bodies of those … [Read more...] about Les Liaisons Dangereuses at Central Square Theater

The Women Who Mapped the Stars production

The Women Who Mapped the Stars at Central Square Theater

// Artscope Online, Theatre

by James Foritano

There are times when a reviewer comes home after a late night to look at his theater ticket and feel like kissing it for the scintillating drama its admission provided. That’s how I felt, in spades, as I looked at author Joyce Van Dyke’s light blue ticket to her play, “The Women Who Mapped the Stars,” now running at the Central Square Theater through May 20. The setting is the Harvard College Observatory in the late 1800s, just as the door of the 20th century was about to swing open on so many new ways of thinking, so many scientific discoveries. That door was also opening for women in science, but more hesitantly, more creakily, and not with the wide-open brio with which it swung open for able men of most any brand. This play takes no time at all to introduce the audience to both the opportunities and the obstacles for women, the former dauntingly narrow but doable, the latter all … [Read more...] about The Women Who Mapped the Stars at Central Square Theater

IMAGE: Christie Lee Gibson (seated), Brian Church, in The Rosenburgs. Photograph by Kalman Zabarsky.

The Rosenbergs (An Opera)

// Theatre

By James Foritano Waltham, MA - Presented by the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) and produced by Boston University and Brandeis University, The Rosenbergs (An Opera) is moving to its Brandeis University venue this Thursday, April 26, to run through its final matinee performance on April 29. Nearly every American knows, if only vaguely, of the controversial trial in 1951 and execution in June 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage by transferring atomic secrets from Los Alamos to Russia in the last half of the 1940’s, just after World War 11. Only a few Americans have seen the North American premiere of this Danish opera performed by the Boston Playwright’s Theatre just last weekend. An opera of a controversial trial for conspiracy in atomic secrets moves these fraught actions and their actors from the stage of reality to that of art, from … [Read more...] about The Rosenbergs (An Opera)

WALT MCGOUGH’S BRAWLER AT THE BOSTON PLAYWRIGHT THEATRE

// Featured, Theatre

by James Foritano BOSTON, MA--It’s an unimposing facade and a small stage inside the Boston Playwrights’ Theater at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, so if you take your cues from looks and size, you’re not prepared at all for the tragic grandeur of “Brawler,” authored by Walt McGough, and directed in a world premiere collaboration with Kitchen Theatre Company by M. Bevin O’Gara. Tragedy, rightly understood, doesn’t seem to appeal to us anymore, the way it did to the ancient Greeks or to Shakespeare. We cherish our “innocence” and bad things just seem to happen to innocent people without their connivance — like extreme weather and ambushes with heavy weapons. Very bad luck, in other words, but unavoidable. The four characters in “Brawler” are, to different degrees, anything but innocent, in spite of the fact that they are all more or less dedicated to nothing more harmful than … [Read more...] about WALT MCGOUGH’S BRAWLER AT THE BOSTON PLAYWRIGHT THEATRE

THE WHITE CARD AT THE EMERSON PARAMOUNT CENTER

// Featured, Theatre

by James Foritano BOSTON, MA--Claudia Rankine’s The White Card, playing through April 1 at the Emerson Paramount Center on the Robert J. Orchard Stage, is about both the privileges of whiteness in a multi-racial society and the enervating struggles of a family in conflict and confrontation. Either one of these themes is huge enough to be handled alone, but both at once, however deftly explored, seemed, to this reviewer to overwhelm rather than enlighten. “Charles,” Daniel Gerroll’s character, is a prosperous developer of everything between and including the polar opposites of hospitals and private prisons, trying to live down the conflict between the nurturing and punishing aspects of these institutions by establishing a foundation which aspires to collect and forefront black art and artists. “Charlotte,” played by Karen Pittman, is a black artist invited for dinner … [Read more...] about THE WHITE CARD AT THE EMERSON PARAMOUNT CENTER