“Nine girls in uniform stretch in a circle on an AstroTurf indoor soccer field. They do the same stretch at the same time for the same amount of time.” This first stage direction in The Wolves introduces us to the activity that the 16- and 17-year-old characters will do for most of the play: warming…
Charles Dickens was born February 7, 1812, the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, worked as a naval pay clerk, but his poor financial habits landed him in debtor’s prison when the younger Dickens was 12. While the rest of his family was imprisoned with his father, Charles was forced to work in…
Nearly each day of the year, somewhere in America, an actor strides on stage and declares, “This play is called Our Town…The name of the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire—just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes; longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes.” ...
“If Juliet is represented as a girl ‘very like Juliet’…..moving about in a ‘real’ house with marble staircases, rugs, lamps and furniture, the impression is irresistibly conveyed that these events happened to this one girl, in one place, at one moment in time. When the play is staged as Shakespeare intended it, the bareness of…
The women pose seductively, hands on hips, mouths stretched into toothy smiles. Their sequined bustiers and miniskirts glisten as the two-foot-tall feathers on their headdresses shift lightly in the breeze. They would be at home on the Las Vegas Strip. Instead, they are inmates in Buen Pastor Prison in Bogotá, Colombia. And for a brief…
A few weeks before rehearsals began for Another Word for Beauty, Academy Award-nominated playwright José Rivera sat down with the Goodman’s Dramaturg Neena Arndt to discuss his research, the themes of the play and Colombian beauty pageants. Neena Arndt: How did you become interested in Buen Pastor Prison, the facility in Bogotá where a beauty…
Where do plays come from? A quick, glib answer is “from the mind of the playwright.” That response, however, fails to take into account the myriad ways in which different artists work to shape their plays. While some writers toil in solitude, others gather inspiration from a variety of sources, and some plays are the…
For the first time in its history, Goodman Theatre dips a toe into the crimson waters of horror this fall with playwright Charise Castro Smith’s Feathers and Teeth. The play focuses on a family whose matriarch recently succumbed to cancer, but rather than taking the form of a taut emotional drama, Feathers and Teeth plumbs its…
In Charise Castro Smith’s genre-blending play Feathers and Teeth, Chris, a teenage girl lamenting the recent death of her mother, plots against her father’s new girlfriend with an intricate revenge plan....