But the sisters and their traumas are hardly original. Health-food hawker Teresa is the fort holder, who stuck close to home, took care of Mum, and resents that. Mary has a skeleton floating in a memory pool she admits may be as infused with imagination as fact. Catherine, the youngest, is the wild child, repeatedly abandoned by all lovers except Jack Daniel’s and Mary Jane. The sisters “don’t get on,” and the play ricochets between funeral arrangements and their pithy squabbling. It’s telling that this tear-strewn work won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy.
Way Theatre Artists is a feisty young troupe, co-producer with Zeitgeist Stage Company of last year’s ambitious and terrific The Kentucky Cycle. Some of the accents here sound closer to Dublin than Yorkshire, but the rhythms fit. And the production fields a few jarring details, among them the inclusion among Mum’s finery of a Wonder Woman costume — though the scene in which the disparate sibs put on their mother’s embarrassing garb and wind up in a communal fit of inappropriate laughter is among the play’s less trite. And there’s a standout performance by Amanda Good Hennessey as the acerb and disappointed Mary, who’s grieving for a lot more than Mum. Perhaps she should change her name to Amanda Goods Hennessey, because she’s got them.
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- Spring stages
As we recover from turning the clocks ahead and making our day’s journey into night a bit longer, area stages are taking a cue from Mother Nature.
- Best on the boards
Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin recently announced that he would leave his post in 2008.
- Best on the boards
Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin recently announced that he would leave his post in 2008.
- Rethinking Chekhov
Conventional wisdom and introductory drama classes describe Anton Chekhov’s final masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard , as a prescient statement about his country’s future, written in 1903 as the playwright was dying.
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Youth may be “a stuff will not endure,” but Noël Coward’s Present Laughter — which takes its title from the Shakespearean ditty that tells us so — certainly does.
- No sex please, we’re bookish
A not so funny thing happened on the way to the Huntington Theatre Company’s planned run of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum : the lead actor accepted a part in a Broadway show.
- Norton Awards go silver
The Elliot Norton Awards turned 25 on Monday night — though that’s nothing compared with Norton himself, who lived to be 100.
- A winter’s tale
Even as the family drama of your holiday comes to a close, there’s no need to don a kerchief and settle in for a long winter’s nap.
- Boston theater season announced
Boston’s biggest theatrical guns have announced what they’ll be showing next season, and it isn’t all Annie and Aeschylus .
- The best on the boards
There have been a few muggings on the rialto this year.
- Home fires
There’s not a samovar in sight, and American playwright Richard Nelson has sharpened and pared down the script.
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Theater
, Entertainment, Business, Sheldon Harnick, More
, Entertainment, Business, Sheldon Harnick, Charlie Alterman, Joe Masteroff, Kate Baldwin, Boston University, Performing Arts, Musicals, Theater, Less
