“All of my writings address human desires and aspirations with a reverence for facts and principles.”
Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere
Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere Published in the Hopkins Review, Winter 2013, New Series 6.1 Take a healthy organism, deny it the environment in which it grows, and it may seek a new environment and new ways of propagating. Serious...
Not in Kansas Anymore: Bus Stop at Center Stage
Director David Schweizer has employed the unique resources of a professional company to sand down some of the rough edges in the script, in a way smaller companies couldn’t do. Using those resources, he has sneakily transformed a mid-century work of American realism into something fantastical like Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, and thereby has solved a lot of problems.
Lives Through Clothes: Love, Loss and What I Wore at FPCT
The Ephrons seem to have set out to make the point that on some profound level, women’s clothes are themselves, and that women’s very lives are bound up with their clothes and vice versa. But the case is not well-documented. And little of it bears the stamp of the Ephron wit. But the performances are fine.
Lovestruck and Crazy Like Foxes: BUS STOP at Spotlighters
The flaws I’ve mentioned are real, but are far from detracting altogether from the enjoyment Bus Stop has to offer. Inge not only speaks up for crazy love, but for rustics who in their own ways are crazy like foxes in their pursuit of it.
Well-Made Dramas
To the audiences thronging recent New York productions of The Common Pursuit and Clybourne Park, any effort by the playwrights to make a “just distribution of good and evil” would surely have seemed both unpalatable and dishonest. And the revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man [sic] shows the dangers of labeling choices and characters too confidently.
The Challenge Is Still There In The Color Purple at Toby’s
The Challenge Is Still There in The Color Purple at Toby's Posted on BroadwayWorld.com on September 17, 2012 The 2005 musical of Alice Walker’s epochal novel The Color Purple, now revived at Toby’s Columbia, is a more-than-honorable attempt to capture the principal...
A Mad Men-Themed Temperamentals at REP Stage
AS the play shows, even if the personal is political, personal trajectories and political ones can diverge. The sundering of Mattachine’s founders from the Society, and then from each other, is deftly rendered, along with the disagreements, persisting to this day, between those who embrace queer culture and wish to stay somewhat aloof from the straight world and assimilationists who view homosexuals as another marginalized minority that must strive for acceptance and integration. In short, this is a big play, with big themes.
Off- and Off-Off-
Is it more important for a memoirist to avoid inflicting pain on those close to him or to tell the truth as he remembers it? Is the allure of suicide to be taken on its own terms or treated with the taboo our society generally imposes upon it? Which should sway the thinking person: the less than conclusive evidence for God’s existence and meaning in the universe or the less than conclusive evidence against God and meaning? There is not going to be an objectively final resolution to these problems. Should drama therefore not “go there”? And if it does “go there,” must the dramatist furnish a right answer? Not in my book.
Sanctified Skullduggery: INCORRUPTIBLE at UMBC
The monastery must now meet the demand for an “incorruptible,” a corpse that never decomposes, the Rolls-Royce of relics. Marie seems ready to be pressed into service over what may be her dead body. And only a bona fide miracle will save the day.
Retooling Makes REP’s LAS MENINAS Strong and Tragic
I was intrigued as soon as I heard that Director Eve Muson was bringing the show to a professional company. My sense was that Muson felt she could build a better product on the same platform of stars, costume and set. She was right. The end product is a modern historical tragedy that obviously speaks directly to contemporary racial and gender issues but also past them to the human condition, as all great tragedy does.
About Jack Gohn
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.