This production of Melancholy Play is well worth seeing for its superb, skillfully paced acting and hilarious individual moments, but it doesn’t accomplish the ambitious task it set out for itself. Reconciling the dark depths of soul with the airy lightness of spirit is a challenge that even poets take a deep breath before presuming to attempt. The humor here hardly trivializes melancholy, but the play remains a parade of contrasting observations rather than a yin-yang reconciliation of opposites.
Related:
Only connect, A need for laughter, Build it and they will come, More
- Only connect
Usually when a cell phone goes off in the theater, you want to kill someone. In the case of Dead Man’s Cell Phone , that’s not necessary.
- A need for laughter
Have you ever laughed at a joke before the punch line?
- Build it and they will come
The drive out Route 6 past the Orleans rotary gets ever more twee as the landscape changes to the scrubby pine and sandy margins of outer Cape Cod.
- Play by Play: November 13, 2009
Boston's weekly theater schedule
- Surreally real life
Why is Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House a brutally funny comedy? Beats me.
- Serious business
Playwright and director Moisés Kaufman likes to say that Oscar Wilde was the first performance artist.
- MSTRKRFT
Most dance punk is just a shower and a missing guitar away from straight dance music, so it’s not such a surprise that aggro-electronicist Jesse F. Keeler of Death from Above 1979 and his group’s producer, Al-P, would go house.
- Holding the phone
Love-birds on a wire are the lead paramours of Neil Simon’s 1977 Chapter Two , a romantic comedy set in New York, produced by the Freeport Community Players under the direction of Barbara Buck.
- Flashbacks, April 14, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Chris Brook and Jessica McConnell.
- Half-baked goods
Once again the Rhode Island Theatre Ensemble is presenting a grab bag of short plays by local playwrights.
- Mamma Mia!
The Abba musical, helmed by stage director Phyllida Lloyd, sails to a real Greek island with its fairy-tale aura intact.
- Less

Topics:
Theater
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Brown University, More
, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Brown University, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Sarah Ruhl, Sarah Tolan-Mee, Phoebe Neidhardt, Less