The three main characters – Tracy Letts as Joe, Annette Bening as Kate and Benjamin Walker as Chris deserve the accolades they have received. Each has mined the character so that the subtext is revealed. Letts and Walker are totally believable as father and son

Today, June 5, friends will gather to celebrate the 75th birthday of the curator Calude Gosselin. Not having visited Montréal in some time we made plans for travel in the fall. That changed abruptly when we were bumped off a flight to the U.K. From the road we called Claude and told him we would arrive in a couple of hours. It was great to catch up. Since the 1980s he has curated major exhibitions including Les Cent jours d’art contemporain de Montréal and Biennale de Montréal. We covered many of those projects.

Veronica's Position is a meaty comedy with offering plenty to think about. Rich Orloff's comedy is an entertaining part backstage comedy, part problem play, part satire. It takes place at the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 in Washington D.C. offering eerie resemblances to today's political climate.

The world premiere of David Lang's prisoner of the state takes place in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic. The 106 member orchestra will perform, but this can hardly be called a concert production. Instead the Hall has been transformed into a prison. Even the instrumentalists on stage are in prison. Costumes, chains and handcuffs were ordered from Bob Barker, the country's leading detention supplier.

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s landmark horror novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which explains why we have been able to see four different versions of the Frankenstein story on stage in Chicago during this theater season. The final production of this series is Lookingglass Theatre’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written and directed by David Catlin. After August 4 it transfers for a three week run at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center.

Darko Tresnjak is going out with a delightful, tuneful musical that will touch your heart. For his last show as artistic director at Hartford Stage he has directed the world premiere musical, The Flamingo Kid now through Saturday, June 15.

Carmen is conducive to fresh, modernized productions, often with changes in time period, geography, and more. Here we have a traditional approach, including the original spoken dialogue, which mark it as an opera comique. This rendition confirms why the opera has stood the test of time.

A major part of freshman orientation on many campus is about Title IX – sexual activity, consent, the school’s policies and the penalties that may result from violation of these.

The Ojai Music Festival in California is almost 75 years old. In this magical setting an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, music making is very much here and now. Each year, an artistic director selects a music director and works with her to program four days of performance, talk and film screenings. While coming for one program undoubtedly gives pleasure, the maximum effect of this festival is to be had by immersion. This is not your ordinary concert program. One performance follows another by design and relationships become more clear as the days pass.

Trident Gallery in Gloucester is presenting Gabrielle Barzaghi: The Tzar’s Children. There will be a discussion wth the figurative /narrative artist on Sunday, June 16, at 4 PM.

Artist and Activist Phil Sellers passed away in July, 2020. He and his wife Gail were part of the team behind the successful Faerie Festival. It is being presented in his honor on June 18. This is fun for the whole family.

Paul Pelkonen, a brilliant critic, died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 46. Paul was one of the great pleasures of reporting on music. He loved it as much as anyone could, and knew more about it than most people. His taste was impeccable.

Phenomenal Nature, the first American retrospective of the remarkable sculptures of Indian artist, Mrinalini Mukherjee, will be on display at the Met Breuer until September 29 and is well worth viewing.

Leo Mateo, the artistic and Executive Director of the Miners Alley Playhouse, is a fan of the podcast form. One day, he heard about Mae Brussell, a prominent conspiracy theorist who lived from 1922-1988. Her radio broadcasts were extremely popular. She dove into JFK’s murder, giving herself as a birthday present 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. Her life and impact are explored in Josh Hartwell's highly entertaining and provocative new play.

The award winning play, America v. 2.1. The Sad Demise and Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, by Stacey Rose is a tough evening of theatre at Barrington Stage Company. It is the inaugural winner of The Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award, a new national play contest at BSC. The playwright has absorbed the spectrum of avant-garde theatre and deflected it as a timely theatrical screed about racism in America, past, present and future.

Come From Away renews our faith in the human race. The popular Broadway musical demonstrates people's innate capacity for kindness. An invigorating equity national touring production is playing in Miami.

A superb production of Sean O’Casey’s play, The Plough and the Stars, concludes the Irish Repertory Theatre’s O’Casey cycle. Charlotte Moore directs this subtly textured staging, deploying all the tools her theatre and actors have honed over the years.

Working Theater Presents the World Premier of Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson by Rob Ackerman , directed by Theresa Rebeck. The Working Theater's Mark Present is the producing artistic director and Laura Carbonell Monarque the managing director bring us a play which is true the the vision and mission of the company. Stories reflect a diverse population of the working majority, acknowledging their complexity by creating theater of interest to working people.

The Swiss dealer, Bruno Bischofberger commissioned a collaboration between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol as well as Francesco Clemente. The project with Clemente fizzled by thrived with the other two artists. The dealer would purchase between sixty and eighty of their works together. The project wasn't completed but eight works from the series are on view at The School in Kinderhook New York. There are some hundred works by the artists on view, Saturdays, through early September.

When I first wrote about Zombie abstraction in December 2013 several months before the concept achieved notoriety in Walter Robinson's now famous essay on Zombie Formalism, I got a blowback in a comment on my Zombie blog from artist Craig Stockwell.

Andrew Ousley has instituted the most exciting and comforting series of concerts in the greater New York area. Using unusual spaces which afford superb acoustics and warming the audience up with excellent whiskeys and cheeses, followed by moonlit walks under a canopy of glorious first growth trees, the audience might end up in Catacombs.

Mark St. Germain met for a lunch break on the first day of rehearsal for his play Gertrude and Claudius based on a 2000 novel by John Updike. Opening on July 31 it will be the thirteenth play by St. Germain to be produced by Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield. The company's second stage is named for him. We discussed the process from Shakespeare to Updike and now St. Germain.

So convincing was Conan Doyle’s creation at the turn of the 20th century both Holmes and Watson were believed to be real people. So much so that the city of London actually turned Holmes’ fictional living quarters at 221- B Baker Street into a physical replica in a building located at 221-B Baker Street; due to the demand of tourists wanting to visit the famous detective’s home.

Six decades later Williamstown Theatre Festival is presenting the Lorraine Hansberry masterpiece Raisin in the Sun. A superb cast is anchored by S. Epatha Merkerson (Lena Younger [Marner]), Francois Battiste (Walter Lee Younger), and Mandi Masden (Ruth Younger). The director Robert O'Hara has stated that he avoided presenting the classic drama as a "museum piece." His improvements and updates, however, are less than judicious

A new play by Jonathan Payne, A Human Being, of a Sort, at Williamstown Theatre Festival is based on an historical event. In 1906 a Congolese Pigmy native, Ota Benga, was brought to New York City, placed in a cage along with monkeys, orangutans and other primates for display in the Bronx Zoo. From this Payne has created a social justice drama that explores racism at the turn of the 20th century.