WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? | Edward Albee didn’t approve the staging in this Publick Theatre production, and he might not approve of the characterization, since director Diego Arciniegas and actors Tina Packer and Nigel Gore have conspired to make professorial “bog” George more masculine than is customary and braying Martha, though brassy as ever, more vulnerable. But except for that shift in the power struggle between Albee’s warring if co-dependent couple, the production is aptly respectful of the material and its early-1960s academic setting. Packer’s Martha is disoriented or blubbery from time to time, but she’s also both playful and primal. Gore is a relaxed yet forceful George, nailing both his acerb and his bitterly reflective arias. Angie Jepson’s Honey is hilariously insolent when emboldened by brandy, yet piquantly pained when her secrets are betrayed. And square-shouldered, thick-haired Kevin Kaine is a near-perfect Nick: a clean-cut, clean-fighting “light heavyweight” up against a couple of brainier Mike Tysons. | Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, 539 Tremont St, Boston | 617.933.8600 | Through October 24 | Curtain 7:30 pm Thurs | 8 pm Fri | 2 + 8 pm Sat | $33-$37.50
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- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Play by play: October 16, 2009
Boston's weekly theater schedule
- Awake! Awake!
Sleep No More , the second entry in the American Repertory Theater’s mini-season of revisionist Shakespeare, is the least orthodox production of Macbeth you’re likely to see. In fact, it’s linked to Macbeth as much by poetic allusion as by narrative — which is to say that it’s a little of both.
- Play by play: October 30, 2009
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Even the sweetest life can shatter in an instant, sending you through the looking glass like Alice. For the euphoric heroine of Craig Lucas's 1988 fable of holiday festivity and arbitrary mayhem, Reckless the moment of reckoning comes when her husband tearfully confesses, on Christmas Eve, that he has taken out a contract on her life.
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"You know," Paulus observes, "we are the American Repertory Theatre, and we haven't spent a lot of time in the repertoire on American drama."
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