By James Foritano CAMBRIDGE - “Photograph 51,” Anna Ziegler’s play which has just had its current run at the Central Square Theater extended through March 18, is about degrees of separation and loneliness between scientists and the human beings who inhabit them more or less uneasily. The Daniel Gidron-directed setting is the post-war race for, as James Watson terms it, ‘the secret of life’ or the double-helix structure of DNA. The race has narrowed to a team of Americans led by Linus Pauling at Berkeley, and two teams of British scientists: Francis Crick and James Watson at Cambridge and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King’s College, London. The first degree of separation is between winners and losers. Although science may be all about knowledge pieced together by generations of seekers, he (or she) who crosses the finish line first wins prizes, status, grants and all the … [Read more...] about Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 at the Central Square Theater

By James Foritano BOSTON - “Monster” by Neal Bell, directed by Jim Petosa, is a full-bodied re-presentation of the enduring fable, first penned by Mary Shelly in 1818, of power run amok: Frankenstein. Lately, science has become so team and grant oriented that not many of us dream of brewing unique, not to say world-conquering, creations in our basement laboratories. Or maybe we do? Certainly, celebrity status is still highly coveted in our 21st century psyches, and “monsters” do run amok in the pages of celebrity magazines and TV — Mary Shelly’s dream re-clothed as “American Idol.” In any case, where better to view power running amok, or even just youthful energy, than the intimate venue of Studio #210 hosted by Boston University’s’s Boston Center for American Performance. Located at 264 Huntington Avenue, cheek-by-jowl with its much grander sister, The Huntington, Studio #210 … [Read more...] about Neal Bell’s “Monster” at the Lane-Comely Theater Studio #210

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