Tag Archives: Betsy Graver

Queen Of Basel Reimagines Miss Julie in Modern South Beach

Amid the rise of the #metoo movement, the surprise in the new play Queen of Basel, subtitled “Or an unapologetic response to Strindberg’s Miss Julie,” is just how closely this modern-day riff still echoes the sadly timeless themes of the 1888 original. But Hilary Bettis’ script, expand and dig deeper into Strindberg’s naturalistic examination of a war between the sexes mingled with a war of economic class distinctions.

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Playhouse’s Noises Off Is Inherently Funny, But Uneven

Noises Off is one of the funniest farces written in the English language and a solid match for Actors Playouse talents. The laughs are plentiful, but this production didn’t wring everything out of this piece that you’ve seen done elsewhere.

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GableStage’s Informed Consent: Is The Search For Truth Paramount? And Whose Truth?

Is knowledge always good? Is its pursuit inherently defensible regardless of the consequences? Is there Absolute Truth?These and another half-dozen ideas careen and crisscross GableStage like electrons colliding in a chain reaction in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Informed Consent.

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Raucous, Raunchy, Heartrending: Thinking Cap’s Collective Rage

Trump may have paraded his demeaning objectification of women by using the word pussy, but it’s a word celebrated over and over in Thinking Cap Theatre’s production of Collective Rage, A Play in Five Betties.
Playwright Jen Silverman and her disparate characters all named Betty use the term to reinforce the liberating quality of having pride in female sexuality.

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What Kind Of Year Was It? Our Critics’ “Best Of” 2016 Lists

Critics and award judges have been talking about it for weeks: The sheer amount of high quality work has made evaluating the last 12 months unusually challenging, but also an opportunity to remember one of the most rewarding calendar years in recent memory. So here’s a supremely subjective stab by all three critics here at Florida Theater On Stage at recognizing the shows and performances that stood out from a pack of productions.

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Chekhov’s Sisters Waiting To Exhale In Beckett’s New Jersey

Deborah Zoe Laufer’s world premiere The Three Sisters of Weekhawken is, indeed, funny in its daffy way, but this imaginative mashup of Chekhov’s meditation on yearning refracted through Beckett’s existentialism and a shred of Neil Simon has a serious and eventually moving moral about the perils of paralyzing procrastination.

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Thinking Cap’s Droll “Or,” Is 21st Century Restoration Comedy

“Or,” is a delightful daffy farce underpinned with social commentary that fits Thinking Cap’s eclectic bent for thought-provoking comedies and dramas that are aggressively off-beat, have a literary bent, or at a minimum are a step away from predictable mainstream fare.

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Hot Button Issues Dissected In GableStage’s Fine Disgraced

Awash in issues of Arab-American assimilation and Anglo antipathy, GableStage’s Disgraced is the classic contemporary example of the topical, thought-provoking drama that forces you to revalidate, even reexamine your perception of the tumult around us.

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Don’t Scratch This Itch At MTC

We want theaters to take chances and Miami Theater Center has bravely invested its artistic vision into classics like Three Sisters. But MTC has missed the target so badly in its misbegotten revival of the 1952 sex comedy The Seven Year Itch that you only thing you want to scratch is your head.

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Dashed American Dream at the Center of Zoetic Stage’s Marvelously Rich “Detroit”

Detroit, Lisa D’Amour’s finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a thought-provoking piece of theater. The Zoetic Stage production finds its own complex groove in Detroit to present a must see in Miami.

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