The Cambridge-based Greenidge has garnered an impressive string of commissions from regional theaters across the country. She is currently a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, and her previous works include 103 Within the Veil, which Company One produced several years ago. The troupe’s commitment to her work is admirable, and Victoria Marsh’s production of The Gibson Girl offers spontaneous performances by Nyla Wissa and Brittany Lang as the twins and a hilarious one by Greg Maraio as Nelson. But Greenidge takes forever to line up her dramaturgical ducks, and even then they don’t add up to a swan.
I am late catching up to SpeakEasy Stage Company’s New England premiere of multiple Tony Award winner Terrence McNally’s Some Men (at the Calderwood Pavilion through March 29). The play, which was commissioned by Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory and ran at New York’s Second Stage Theatre last year, is surprisingly weak. It’s as if McNally had decided today’s gay young whippersnappers needed to know their history, lest they think Maine’s Stonewall Kitchen is all about fancy condiments.
So the play begins and ends at a contemporary gay wedding at the Waldorf but flashes back as far as the 1920s, offering vignettes of (male) gay life across the 20th century. There are a couple of droll scenes, one being the interview by two Vassar students of a long-time same-sex couple from the 68-year-old McNally’s generation. And being swept back into the devastation of the AIDS crisis cannot help but draw a tear. But the play is inferior to Paul Daigneault’s fluid production on a wedding cake of a set by Eric Levenson that’s prettily lit by Chris Fournier. Among the competent and versatile cast, Diego Arciniegas brings a thoughtful intensity to Bernie, a character who served in Korea and married before coming out. And Will McGarrahan pulls out the stops of repressed rage for a muscular drag-queen rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Like those bluebirds, even a cliché can fly.
Related:
Primary colors, I sink, therefore I am, Year in Theater: Staged right, More 
- Primary colors
Now that the holiday hubbub is behind us, we have no dreams of white Christmases or visions of Sugar Plum Fairies to warm a theatergoer’s heart.
- I sink, therefore I am
Seascape , Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company.
- Year in Theater: Staged right
It's been a Buckingham Palace season on the local rialto.
- The games people play
Who’s afraid of Edward Albee?
- Perfect Balance
Harold Pinter once said that his plays were about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.”
- Basking in life
Nancy and Charlie (Kate Braun and Peter Josephson) have made it to the other side: Their kids are raised, released into the world, and producing their own offspring.
- Paint by numbers
Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women are really one tall woman, and she’s a tall order.
- Animal farm
The word tragedy means “goat song” in ancient Greek, and indeed, the protagonist of Edward Albee’s The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? is making beautiful music with a mistress of the caprine persuasion.
- Whose Zoo?
There are several ways to visit the zoo.
- Origins of a species
In her excellent theatrical pairing for Daniel Productions at the Players’ Ring, billed as 2 x 2 x 2 , director Liz Korabek juxtaposes two modern takes on the human quintessence.
- Back to life
Well, it was a close call, but now that we’ve crossed the Stygian flood of Christmas Carols and other holiday fiascos, we can get back to the business of theater that might occasionally surprise, scandalize, and even keep us breathing.
- Less
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Theater
, Entertainment, Malcolm X, W. Somerset Maugham, More
, Entertainment, Malcolm X, W. Somerset Maugham, Will McGarrahan, Vassar College, Pulitzer Prize Committee, Performing Arts, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Diego Arciniegas, Less
