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

By James Foritano CAMBRIDGE — The Bad Habit Theater Company is up to its old habits, this time acting out Lanford Wilson’s scathing indictment, loving celebration of rural, small-town America in his comic and disturbing Book of Days. Their usual venue, the Durrell Theater of the Cambridge YMCA, is appropriately “down home” for this third in a cycle of three plays Bad Habit has produced to illustrate: “the trials of being good and the temptations of being bad.” Every locale has its unique temptations and trials, not least, small towns. Here in the fictional town of Dublin, Missouri, population 4,780, give or take, “badness” is coated, and not always superficially, with a sweet layer of neighborliness. Nearly everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and loves his or her neighbor, according to the tenets of Protestant Christianity, more or less. Trouble is, self-love, especially if … [Read more...] about Theater Review: Book of Days

By James Foritano BOSTON-In Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” Venice is a frenetic, even a mad world. It spews up and swallows merchant princes and their hangers-on, gilded heiresses and their pursuers. In director Darko Tresnjak’s staging, the ornate Cutler Majestic theater turns high-tech. Players of all stripes scurry back and forth, cell-phones to ear, dancing on multiple levels of scaffolding to the tune of getting and (excuse the expression) lending. Three flat screens stream numbers, or, alternately, picture an unquiet ocean where fortunes are afloat. Serenissima, or the Queen of the Adriatic, might cultivate airs of aristocratic leisure, but she is a world “on the make,” of deals, clasped with a warm handshake — or not. So, Bassanio tells his friend Antonio, who, in case you didn’t know, is the merchant of Venice, that he is, well, somewhat “our of pocket,” but, has … [Read more...] about Theatre Review: ARTSEmerson presents The Merchant of Venice

By James Foritano BOSTON --- In celebration of the stagecraft of legendary director Peter Brook, ArtsEmerson is producing “The Grand Inquisitor,” which opened March 24 at the Black Box Theater in the Paramount Center and runs through April 3. The play is based on a passage from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” and was adapted by Marie Helene Estienne. The concept of the play is that Christ is strolling the streets of Seville on a sultry evening during the most terrible time of the inquisition in Spain, sometime in the 1500s. Around 100 heretics, give or take, have been “burned at the stake” just the other evening, so there is unusual activity in the streets. Nevertheless Christ himself is easily recognized by the citizens who not only acclaim him, but also urge him to perform a miracle — which he does. The Grand Inquisitor, played by Bruce Myers, happens on the scene and has … [Read more...] about Theater Review: The Grand Inquisitor

by JAMES FORITANO BOSTON-According to reliable weatherpersons, my theater-going wife and I missed a frightening outbreak of multiple lightning strikes followed by sudden hail from the lowering skies of Boston prior to heading out for a night of theater. If those weatherpersons had wanted to experience truly frightening weather they should have been front and center with us in the “sheltered bowl” of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. Although the “weather” on stage builds slowly and deftly, nothing prepares one for the fireworks that erupt when Asher Lev accuses his devoutly Hasidic father of “esthetic blindness” and dad ripostes with an equally felt accusation of “moral blindness.” Maybe you haven’t studied the universe of the Hasidim, which, according to the theater program’s glossary, is “a highly religious sect” convinced that “everything one does could be a spiritual act.” Or … [Read more...] about Theater Review- “My Name is Asher Lev”