How well one likes this production depends very much upon how appealing one finds the constant morphing and switching place of characters. If shifting psychodynamics are your thing, this version caters to your taste.

The story of why and how Salieri did Mozart in (this is not necessarily historical) is encumbered – there is no other word for it – by Salieri’s narration. Nor is this a “just the facts, ma’am” narration; this is the tortured but ploddingly literal tale of Salieri’s failed relationship with God himself, of God’s betrayal of a bargain Salieri feels God made with him, by giving Mozart a divine talent that should have been Salieri’s. It is also a sort of greatest-hits retrospective of Mozart’s compositions, especially his operas. That’s an awful lot of freight for a single play to carry.

It’s hard for me to stop saying wow. Wow to the theater, a three-tier structure that echoes the layout of Shakespeare’s own Globe (albeit with the modern convenience of a roof – and some others including two bars and ergonomic seating that assures there is no standing for today’s groundlings). Wow to the play, one of Shakespeare’s funniest. Wow to the acting, the direction, the staging, the lighting. The audience is assured of over two hours of being in stitches.

Both the play and the play-within-the-play preach the same sermon: You may be trying to do something that attains meaning by being witnessed and judged, but in truth no one will ever see you or judge you. As an understudy, you are condemned to eliciting what meaning you can from what one frustrated character in A Chorus Line summed up as “dancing for my own enjoyment.”

That all does not end well is a given with personalities like these; that Huey is on the side of history we also know. Working to the uneasy compromise between these two dynamics is all we really ask of the plot, and we get it.

Trip needs to get himself and his family ‘up north of the Boulevard’ to a more civilized neighborhood. Then an unexpected circumstance dumps an opportunity in Trip’s lap. The only problem is that, to take it, Trip would need to leave his integrity behind and possibly risk going to jail. Is getting north of the Boulevard worth it for Trip and his buddies? Does Trip even have a meaningful choice?

This play, about a small group of black visionaries attempting to establish visibility in a white Oregon town which has excluded and disregarded them, is provocative but hard to follow.

Death By Tranny?: DEAD AND BREATHING at CATF Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 14, 2014 The question is posed in the first few minutes of Chisa Hutchinson's Dead and Breathing: Can Carolyn, a wealthy black widow dying by inches of cancer, persuade Veronika, her at-home...

There are the bones here of a perfectly respectable play about rape and what comes after in the U.S. military and veterans’ system. The play does a fine job of showing how command will undercharge the perpetrators and penalize victims; how urgent requests for veterans’ benefits will become lost in the system; and how the supposed advocates for the victims will be deadened by the way the system has made them ineffective. Perhaps more originally, there is a real exploration of the dynamics of military rape itself, of the question why rape is so prevalent in that environment. Frankly, I did not understand why playwright Fuller felt the need to revert to the revelation-of-dark-secrets template at all. A straightforward telling of the tale would have sufficed nicely.