It begins innocuously enough. A young, upwardly mobile Wall Street attorney (and lapsed Muslim) and his beautiful, idealistic (and Caucasian) artist wife are throwing a small dinner party for a similarly successful couple, a Jewish art curator (who’s about to feature his hostess’ paintings in a new show) and his African American wife, another rising…
In a world in which many things (including plays) are easily categorized, Charise Castro Smith’s Feathers and Teeth is a delightful anomaly. At first glance, it’s a dark parody of such late ‘70s family sitcoms as The Brady Bunch, replete with shag carpeting, lacquered hairstyles and uneasy family dinners. Beneath its chrome-and-plastic surface, though, the play…
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…
Now among the most celebrated American plays of this decade, Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced will soon become among the most performed, with more than 20 regional theater productions scheduled for the coming season alone. Following is a brief history of the play’s journey from its acclaimed off-Loop roots to its Tony Award-nominated Broadway run and beyond.…
In Disgraced, Emily’s portrait of her husband Amir in the style of Diego de Silva y Velázquez’s 1650 Portrait of Juan de Pareja becomes one of the central images of the play. The Seville-born Velázquez (1599-1660) is regarded as one of the finest painters of the Baroque period. Although he was not born into a…
Horror may not be the most prevalent genre on stage, but several plays and musicals have attempted to send audiences home in fright. Learn about a few below! Macbeth Shakespeare’s works are filled with sinister, supernatural and blood-thirsty characters, but perhaps none more so than Macbeth–a play surrounded by so much superstition, many theater professionals…
