Infrequent yet ominous piano music penetrates a summer retreat, crammed with the accouterments of artistic craft and disharmony. Adolph (Josh Tyson), an artist belittled by a desperate love for his writer wife Tekla (Elise Stone) and the tangled webs …Read more

In a locker/meeting/breakfast/lunch/living room of a car manufacturer in Detroit, signs cover the walls: “No Gambling”; “No Smoking”; “No Playing Music”. A strict “stop and search policy” is enforced upon the workers passing through the room each day …Read more

A Dream of Red Pavilions is one of the four the most famous works of traditional Chinese literature, the other three being Journey to the West, The Tales of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin (All Men are Brothers), but little known outside of Asia. …Read more

As Sojourners begins, we see a very pregnant Abasiama (Chinasa Ogbuagu) in her house, as she has a conversation with her belly. Wondering what to eat, there’s a sense of restlessness in how she moves from the living room to the kitchen, and how she l …Read more

It seems that the older we get, the less we understand our parents, even if aging would suggest that adulthood would in fact connect us more to them. In Richard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair siblings Abby (Kate Arrington) and Seth (Greg Kelle …Read more

One enters the story told in The Millay Sisters by way of a sort of tipsy stumble. Rachel Murdy, playing the role of Norma Millay, serves as emcee in a nostalgic cabaret type of set-up, singing songs from the early twentieth century to the piano acco …Read more

Say what you will about Donny, he’s a showman. A teen magician, Donny (played by the magnetic Harry Farmer) is deluded in his abilities, he’s blinkered to anything beyond the scope of his act, he lacks the ability to connect with others or glean thei …Read more

Life, death and Walt Whitman are subject to heightened scrutiny in the explosive two-hander I And You. Referring to the project Caroline (Kayla Ferguson) and Anthony’s (Reggie D. White) English teacher assigns to explore the meaning of pronouns in Wh …Read more

Toshiki Okada’s God Bless Baseball, performed in Japanese and Korean with English subtitles at Philadelphia’s FringeArts, is a masterful exploration of the dangers of leaving home, or least home plate.  Through the eyes of two baseball-curious laymen …Read more

For most writers, there is much catharsis in storytelling. In the case of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Gambler, the real-life roulette addict wrote with considerable knowledge about a fictional roulette addict. The novel’s true purpose however, i …Read more