Post Tagged with: "Allens Lane Theater"

My first time on stage was at the Allens Lane Theater. Almost forty years and over a hundred theater experiences later, I got to return and watch the quirky play QUAKE written by Melanie Marnich. QUAKE chronicles the travels of Lucy who quite abruptly engages in a quixotic journey to […]

Mt. Airy’s Allens Lane Arts Center is closing out their current theatrical season with WHEN SHE DANCED by Martin Sherman. Directed by Maurizio Giammarco, the play deals with the later life of iconic dancer Isadora Duncan, and will run in the Center’s cabaret style theatre from May 2nd to the […]

The second offering in Allens Lane Arts Center’s current season is Naomi Iizuka’s 1997 play POLAROID STORIES. Directed by Sarah Mittledorf, the piece is on the Mt. Airy company’s stage from November 22nd to December 7th. Iizuka was born in Tokyo to an American-Latina mother and a Japanese father; she […]

“…And, finally, our Theatre will say segregation is ridiculous because it makes perfectly wonderful people, white and black, do ridiculous things!”~from Purlie’s I.O.U. Allens Lane Arts Center is celebrating 60 years of live theatre this season. First on the boards is Ossie Davis’ 1961 comedy PURLIE VICTORIOUS, running at the […]

In the opening scene of Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, the audience is both startled and perplexed by a lamenting wail and a fish dropped from the sky. I couldn’t help but wonder what I was in for. It’s 2039 in Alice Springs, Australia, when we […]

In this thoroughly delightful farce of the absurd, the longing for love and the desire for more than life’s less lively apects can offer is explored through one woman’s pervasive aura of melancholy. Her beautiful melancholia is such that it transcends those around her and causes them to wallow in […]

Comedy or Drama? This question has obsessed theater artists since the Moscow Art Theater first presented THE SEAGULL over one hundred years ago. Chekhov, who carefully observed numerous artists, including himself, found much to enjoy in the antics of these desperate, narcissistic creative types, who often had trouble distinguishing the […]

  This is the inaugural episode of Stage Magazine’s “Curtain Up!” podcast.  Hosted by Chris Laning, each weekly episode will give you a run down of the shows opening that upcoming weekend.  What a great way to find out, quickly and easily what is going on in and around […]

Romulus Linney’s CHILDE BYRON opened at Allens Lane Theater Friday evening.  The story chronicles the life of the venerated yet controversial poet from the late 18thcentury through the eyes of his daughter Ada Lovelace, skillfully played by Jennifer Summerfield.  Ada summons the spirit of Byron and steps into the role […]

The laughter begins almost immediately in WONDER OF THE WORLD.  Cass Harris is leaving her husband of seven years, Kip, because she has found out his guilty secret.  I won’t reveal the secret (no spoilers here), but it involves the name Vivian.  Kip is, naturally, distressed, but even there, the […]

Now I had a rather sheltered childhood in the suburbs of the 1960s; I have no personal frame of reference for the struggles of black Americans during the first half of the 20th century. The closest I can come is being left-handed in a right-handed world. Playwright Lynn Nottage has […]

Michele Lowe’s STRING OF PEARLS is about a strand of perfectly rounded gems exchanging ownership, and the emotional affect they bring to the women who possess them. That said, now get six actresses, split the 27 roles among them, and let them go. The zeal shown by Anne Bailis, Ginny […]

I was in seventh grade, sitting in my social studies class when I found out that a plane had hit The World Trade Center. To be honest, I didn’t quite know what The World Trade Center was. To me it was just “another building” in New York City. It’s amazing […]

Allens Lane Theater’s latest production, Charles Dickens’ HARD TIMES, is an interesting piece. The play is based on the tenth novel by the famous author, first published in 1854, and is aimed at highlighting the social and economic pressures of the times. The novel was serialized in its initial publishing, […]

IN THE BLOOD, by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, is a poignantly portrayed tragedy about Hester La Negrita (portrayed by Tené Fletcher), an impoverished mother of five bastard children by five different fathers.Mother and children, whom she refers to as […]