Terry Morgan

Sandy Martin and Daniel Billet in "A House Not Meant to Stand." (Photo by Ed Krieger) This is the centenary of Tennessee Williams' birth year, and as a result theatres all over the nation are honoring his plays, from the famous to the obscure. To this end, the Fountain Theatre has mounted a revival of A House Not Meant to Stand, his last produced work. Unfortunately, the script is a mess, combining warmed-over Williams...

Two things writer/performer Heather Woodbury doesn’t lack are talent and ambition. Her 1996 solo play What Ever was ten hours long and featured 100 characters, all of which she performed (often as several characters in conversation with each other), and it was described by the New York Times as “a masterwork of the solo form.” Her ensemble...

Marissa Chibas and Matthew Goodrich in "Camino Real" - Photo by Ed Krieger. For the centenary of Tennessee Williams’ birth year, the Theatre@Boston Court and CalArts School of Theater have collaborated on a production of his rarely produced 1953 work, Camino Real. The play is unique in Williams’ oeuvre in that it’s surreal and heavily symbolic without much in terms of traditional plot. It seems like Williams’ take on No Exit, albeit set in...

Neil LaBute has become the poet laureate of bad behavior, the national chronicler of people treating each other abominably. He's gotten a rep for misogyny from movies such as In the Company of Men and plays such as Fat Pig, but I think this is a reductive and inaccurate view. In both of those works, his sympathy is clearly with the victims.

Bruce Green, Benny Wills and Brett Colbeth in "The Capulets & the Montagues" -- Photo by John Apicella. Most theatergoers are familiar with Romeo & Juliet, and by now the classic tragedy has been performed and adapted to death. Well, at least the Shakespeare version has. Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, a contemporary of the Bard, wrote his own version from the same source material--and it's very different. It's funny, for example. It has...

Linda Gehringer, Marin Hinkle, Brian Kerwin, Lily Holleman and Arye Gross in "Circle Mirror Transformation" at South Coast Repertory. Photo by Ben Horak/SCR. In reviewing, expectations are a big deal. Going into a show with expectations set either too high or too low can ultimately affect one's opinion. For a critic, it's a work hazard, and I try to be cognizant of keeping my expectations in check. However, when a play is being promoted...

Ron Bottitta and Tucker Smallwood in "The Sunset Limited" -- Photo by John Flynn. Cormac McCarthy isn't a "glass half full" kind of guy. Heroes rarely prevail in his novels, and if they do, as in The Road, the price paid for victory is often death. Being a moral person in an amoral universe is punishingly difficult, he seems to say. In his novels, this theme is generally disguised beneath a veil of plot,...

Joe Fria and Scott Leggett in "Watson." (Photo by Brian Taylor) There has been no lack of adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. He's infiltrated every form of media for the last hundred years, and as I write this, he's the lead in a big Hollywood franchise and the subject of a modernization via a BBC TV series. This begs the question: can anything new and significantly fresh be done...

Anne Gee Byrd, Stephen Caffrey, Jeanie Hackett and Zoe Perry in "The Autumn Garden." -- photo by Ed Krieger. Lillian Hellman chose the title of her play The Autumn Garden well. Its inhabitants are generally of an age where they have begun to grade their lives as to success and happiness to see if their story has been a comedy or a tragedy. They haven't settled into winter yet, where thoughts of mortality begin...

Donald Agnelli, Tim Cummings and Kevin Stidham in "War" -- photo by David Robertson. There's nothing wrong with a small cast or even a solo performer show--these forms are ideal for focusing intensely on character or theme. A large ensemble show, however, is inherently more theatrical, a trickier beast to tame. The folks at Theatre Banshee, however, have never lacked for ambition or talent, and their new production of Roddy Doyle's War (presented in...