ATLANTA
The Alliance Theatre's adaptation of James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, running through May 5, depicts ecstatic worship while debating soul versus substance. As Rev. Margaret Alexander and her estranged husband, Luke, Carol Mitchell-Leon and Taurean Blacque (Hill Street Blues) wage pitched war over rescuing Luke's soul versus resuming their passion. Mitchell-Leon and Blacque mesmerize under Kenny Leon's seething direction, which infuses showdowns with their musician son, David (Sean Patrick Leonard), who opts for jazz over gospel. An Armageddon over control of the church is pumped by loyalist Elizabeth Omilami lacerating hypocrite Margo Moorer, set to Dwight Andrews' music, which shows belters to be as earthy as they are ethereal. Amen readies Atlanta for the critical scrutiny it will receive this summer in the cultural Olympiad.
A completely different summit of Southern culture is portrayed in the Appalachian drama Foxfire at Marietta's Theatre in the Square through April 28. Tenderly directed by David DeVries with subtle lighting effects by Ken Yunker, Foxfire features a straightforward star turn by Elizabeth McCommon as matriarch Annie Nations. McCommon inhabits her character without affectation, and she enhances David Milford and Chris Kayser's performances as her husband and son, too.
Two recent shows were flawed yet worthy. The premiere of Tim McDonough's American Wake (closed April 13) at Theatre Emory, directed by McDonough and wife Janice Akers, was exhausting in chronicling 1920s Irish immigrants' departure from Eire. Still McDonough writes ardently and Teresa DeBerry's closing Act I soliloquy was stunning.
Chris Coleman unearthed a chilly Pterodactyls, by Nicky Silver, for Barking Dog Theatre (closed April 14), featuring fresh Atlanta faces Josie Burgin Lawson and Jim Roof, and veteran actor Frank Roberts as an inept father.
Meanwhile, 7 Stages' American premiere of George Tabori's My Mother's Courage, directed by Veronica Nowag-Jones (closed March 24), enthralled Atlanta audiences with the slipshod savagery of the Nazis toward Jews. Tabori's soft, unassuming mother is played with panache by Faye Allen.
--DAVE HAYWARD
Chapel Hill's Archipelago Theatre and the Duke University Drama Program teamed up in April with Those Women, an experimental mixture of Greek myth, mid-life passages, and suburban melodrama assembled by writer Nor Hall, director Ellen Hemphill, and composer Sam Piperato. Spectator magazine's Robert McDowell called it a "sometimes perplexing but always intriguing piece" in which the women of a 1950s bridge club "figuratively and literally let down their hair and embrace their pagan heritage."
The state's two mountain-based professional summer theatres have announced their 1996 seasons. Blowing Rock Stage Company will offer two old favorites--Oliver! (June 20-July 1) and Arsenic and Old Lace (July 18-29)--plus a pair of new shows: Jerry Finnegan's Sister (July 4-15), a two-character romantic comedy by Jack Neary, and The Daily News (Aug. 1-10), a musical by Jonathan Daly set on the home front during World War II.
Flat Rock Playhouse will present Mixed Emotions (May 29-June 2), Blithe Spirit (June 5-15), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (June 19-26), Brigadoon (July 3-14), A Tuna Christmas (July 17-28), Crazy for You (Aug. 7-18), The Moving of Lilla Barton (Aug. 28-Sept. 8), and Arms and the Man (Sept. 11-22). Two of the first six shows will be repeated July 30-Aug. 2 and Aug. 21-25 and there will be a yet-unchosen fall show Oct. 9-20.
On March 23, theatre professionals from across the state gathered in High Point to remember George Parides, who died in February at the age of 52. George was managing director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill in the early '80s and later served nine years as director of the Theatre Section of the N.C. Arts Council. In 1994, he founded the Cornucopia Agency in Wilmington. He also found time to serve on the advisory boards of the N.C. Black Theatre Festival, the N.C. Theatre Conference, and Arts Advocates of North Carolina. George's memorial celebration was a poignant reminder of a definition he once gave of his own role: "What I do best is bring people together and make dreams come true."
--V. CULLUM ROGERS
Rick Lombardo will replace Larry Lane as artistic director of The New Repertory Theatre in Newton Highlands, Mass. Lane, who helped found the theatre, resigned a few months ago to devote himself to playwriting and independent directing projects.
Lombardo was most recently artistic director of The Players Guild of Canton, Ohio, but he's no stranger to Boston: He earned a master's in fine arts from Boston University's School for the Arts. He taught theatre and drama at Fordham University College at Lincoln Center in New York City and founded the Stillwaters Theatre Company, an Off-Off-Broadway company.
New Works for a New World is soliciting proposals for new plays to be developed as part of its summer play lab during July 1997. Produced by the New WORLD Theater and the New England Foundation for the Arts, New Works is designed to help playwrights of color develop new plays reflecting the diversity of American culture. Playwrights selected receive an honorarium of $1,500, plus room and board for two weeks in Amherst, where they will work with directors and resident dramaturgs at the University of Massachusetts' Department of Theater. Submissions must be postmarked by June 3. For information, write to Virginia Scott, Resident Dramaturg, New Works for a New World, c/o Department of Theater, 112 Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Box 32620, Amherst, MA 01001-2620, or call her at (413) 545-3490.
Hard on the heels of the Huntington Theatre's production of Hamlet, the Merrimack Repertory Theatre (Lowell, Mass.) is presenting the Shakespeare tragedy with British-born actor Douglas Weston, directed by David Kent and David Zoffoli, May 3-25. Going from the sublime to Lloyd Webber, Boston's Colonial Theatre is housing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat starring Donny Osmond. The run is open-ended; the producers are hoping, with the help of good old theatrical wizardry and an advertising budget large enough to fund a small emerging nation, to keep the show going for at least a year.
--DAVID FRIEZE
The Arizona Theatre Company has had a busy year, even beyond the usual practice of performing a production for three weeks at each venue--the Temple of Music and Art in Tucson and then the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix.
Besides a yearly theatre tour in the U.K., this state theatre of Arizona runs many audience outreach programs; the discussion program By Design, for instance, is a joint venture with the College of Humanities of the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Productions, nonetheless, are the company's main focus. Just coming off a March 23-May 4 run of Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh, ATC has mounted its final production of the season--the world premiere of Private Eyes by Steven Dietz.
ATC's artistic director, David Ira Goldstein, continuing his long association with Dietz, is directing Private Eyes (April 27-May 18, Tucson; May 24-June 8, Phoenix).
In case Dietz fans are confused, he wrote this play about "love, lust, and deception" in 1992 and named it The Usual Suspects; in 1993, the GENESIS: New Play Reading Series workshopped it under that name. Then the Bryan Singer movie of the same name came out in September 1995 after ATC had announced its season.
Dietz explains the name change, somewhat ruefully: "While it's true that my play was written well before the movie, it's also true that a title can't be copyrighted. Therefore, if I wanted to, I could have titled my play The Glass Menagerie--though I suspect audiences would be confused when the Gentleman Caller and those little figurines never showed up."
Dietz professes to like the new title, Private Eyes, better because it still has "the trenchcoat-and-fedora image" but also conjures up two lovers alone together "with nothing between them but the gaze of their eyes--part embrace, part lie-detector."
--CLAUDIA W. HARRIS
The Du Maurier World Stage Festival, organized by Toronto's Harbourfront cultural centre, offers Toronto audiences a biennial sample of the world's--and this country's--best theatre.
The sixth edition of the festival, which ran April 11-28, generated a fair share of theatrical excitement, though artistic director Don Shipley has steered a more middle-of-the-road course than his predecessors. He drew heavily on companies which have performed at World Stage before, and only one of 14 mainstage shows--Moral Ambiguities, from Cuba's Teatro Escambray--was not in English.
Still, the productions from Canada, the U.K., the U.S., France/-Switzerland, and South Africa offered memorable experiences, including the performances of South African playwright Athol Fugard and exciting newcomer Esmerelda Bihl in Fugard's gentle parable Valley Song and the seamless ensemble work by the all-female cast of Traverse Theatre's Bondagers.
But the festival's highlight was British actor Fiona Shaw's searing delivery of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Stalking a disused distillery lit by bare lightbulbs, Shaw--sharp, satirical, and sorrowful by turns--brought Eliot's allusive, fragmentary lament vividly to life.
The Canadian contingent included disappointing work from two longtime World Stage associates. Dead Souls was an underpowered new piece from Montreal's imagistic Carbone 14. Elsinore, Robert Lepage's high-tech one-man Hamlet was an audacious and at times dazzling piece that lacked the thematic depth and storytelling verve of his best work.
More modest but more successful was A Line in the Sand by Vancouver playwrights Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef. Inspired by the Gulf War and the murder of a Somali teenager by Canadian peacekeeping troops, the play is a taut and provocative examination of racism, power, and violence, driven by the dynamic performances of Vincent Gale, Tom Butler, and Camyar Chai.
Stratford Festival actor Lee MacDougall made a remarkably confident playwriting debut with High Life, a breezy, brutal comedy about a "perfect" bank heist gone awry. The Jim Millan-directed production by Toronto's Crow's Theatre featured a top-flight cast--Randy Hughson, Ron White, and Tony winner Brent Carver--performing with enthusiastic enjoyment.
--JIL