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MEGAN GRUMBLING
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For whom the bell tolls
An array of disciplines have taken on the puzzle of life and death.
Honoring the masses
Though there's no hard evidence that Marie Antoinette actually uttered "Let them eat cake," she remains a larger-than-life symbol of ruling-class decadence and a culture of gaping wealth disparity.
Disaster Preparation
The US Bureau of Land Management estimates that 90 percent of existing natural-gas wells in this country use hydraulic fracturing techniques — commonly known as "fracking" — that inject pressurized water and toxic chemicals into the ground.
Beyond the wall
"Are we going to do any real acting?" complains the one teenager enrolled in a small Vermont community center's drama class.
Go West, young woman
"I savor the boundlessness of it all," exalts life-loving Macon (Sally Wood) to timid Bess (Jennifer Porter), under the vertiginously open sky of 1860s Wyoming Territory.
Ups and downs in new works
This year, the ten short plays of Acorn Productions' 11th Annual Maine Playwrights Festival, chosen from more than 50 submitted to this year's open call, tends toward the dark: it includes specters of AIDS, the economic downturn, child abuse, and death by wild animals.
Meeting Billie
With its low lighting, cocktail tables, scarlet-draped piano, and old-timey microphone, the scene at Freeport Factory Stage is set as a small club readied for an intimate night of jazz.
Taking their time
In one sense, time is the most plentiful possession of World War I veterans Gustave (Edmond Genest), Henri (Munson Hicks), and Philippe (Philip Goodwin), who live together in a military retirement home in the French countryside.
Speaking openly
"The center of everything," writes Gibson Fay-LeBlanc in Death of a Ventriloquist , "is the mouth."
Seething spirits
Myriad Portland spirits have conspired in raising the much-anticipated new production of Lorem Ipsum, an elegant, bewitchingly multi-medial staging of and around Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts .
With Neil Simon's Little Me
Of all the tenets in the American mythology, upward mobility is one of the biggies, both the most exalted and the most critiqued: We have both our Pretty Women and our Sisters Carrie.
Cracking a Smile
The parents of children with severe disabilities have an almost incalculably different experience than other parents.
Williams at 100
A young boy walks the railroad tracks with a delusional girl who lives alone in an old house.
Stringed instruments
Our story thus far: The war is over! No, not the Iraq War, but one of even more mythological origins: After ten years of battle against Troy, the victorious war hero Odysseus, whose distinctively phallic sword arm has a life of its own, is poised to finally lead his troops back home to Ithaca.
Turning up the heat
Almost everything goes unsaid in Harold Pinter's 1958 classic, The Birthday Party .
Finding courage
Deep in the Appalachian swamp, young Wiley (Luke Stickney, winningly) lives among tree toads, alligators, and plenty of magical spirits.
Fragile suffering
Tom's restlessness at home in St. Louis, where he's stuck providing for his plaintive mom and crippled sister, becomes particularly oppressive in the very architecture of the Freeport Factory Stage.
Adaptive ensemble
Dead guys, mysterious dames, mobsters, dirty cops, and a handsome array of handguns are all in a night's work for Philip Marlowe, novelist Raymond Chandler's quintessential LA private eye.
Could be verse
While down in Cambridge last August with a team of Portland poets for the semi-finals of the National Poetry Slam, Tricia Henley Pryce says, she never saw more than one woman up on stage at a time.
The one who knew too much
Three months after her father's death, the two people closest to thirty-something Suzanna (Elizabeth Chambers) don't have a lot of patience for her grief, which has her reduced to a weeping mess watching bad TV under a blanket.
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