Play reviews

The Shawl by David Mamet
Character list:
John- a man in his fifties
Miss A- a woman in her late thirties
Charles- a man in his thirties
Summary: Miss A goes to John for advise in the form of a séance. John pretends like he is psychic in cohorts with him is Charles.

-life to stage life

Shakespear in Love movie directed by John Madden
Characters:
Shakespear
Viola
Tagline: A Comedy About the Greatest Love Story Almost Never Told

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson
Seth Holley, owner of the boardinghouse
Bertha Holly, his wife
Bynum Walker, rootworker
Rutherford Selig, a peddler or sellsman the people finder
Jeremy Furlow, a resident looking for companionship
Herald Loomis, a resident the main character who is in search for his wife after they got separated due to Joe Turner capturing him and turning him into a slave. He now travels with is daughter
Zonia Loomis, his daughter
Mattie Campbell, a resident
Reuben Scott, a boy who live next door and plays with Zonia
Molly Cunningham, a resident that ends up hooking up with Jeremy
Martha Loomis, wife of Herald
Summary: people who travel stop to live a the boarding house. The people finder find Heralds wife. 2 important scenes stage directions The Juba in Act 1 Scene 4 and Act 2 scene 5 when Herald meets his wife cuts himself then more interesting stage directions

-identity and playwrights vision

Talley’s Folley
Sally Talley
Matt Friedman

Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress (Play with in a play Catastrophe or Trouble in Bellville about voting rights in 1955)
Characters:
Al Manners- director who at first conceals his true racist feelings but in the end explodes because of Wiletta constant antagonizing.
Wiletta Mayer- plays the mother that gives her son up to be lynched. But she as an actress wrestles with this part because it is no something she would do in real life and she gets into it with the director pushing him to show his true colors
Henry-

John Nevins- plays character that is about to get lynched because he rallies blacks to vote. In real life is a young and inexperienced actor
Millie Davis-
Sheldon Forrester
Judy Sears
Eddis Fenton- stage manager, young aspires to be like Manners
Bill O’Wray- celeb in the play, director tries to get him to socialize with other actors
Summary: A play to make people aware of social injustices

-actors vs. directors collective and individualism

And The Soul Shall Dance by Wakako Yamauchi
Characters:
Murata, 40 Issei farmer
Hana, 35 Issei farmer’s wife of Murata
Masako, 11 nisei daughter of Murata’s
Oka, 45 Issei farmer married to the crazed Emiko has a daughter that wants to come live with him. He neglects his wife and give all she has to his daughter.
Emiko- wife of Oka goes crazy because how her husband treats her and because he settle for her after sister dies. She ends up going crazy singing then leaving.
Kiyoko, 14 Oka’s daughter from first wife was staying with grandparent in Japan

Fires In The Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith
It is a play composed of different people accounts of statements of events in Crown Heights. “The central theme of Fires in the Mirror is the racially motivated anger and violence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the early 1990s. From the many perspectives in Smith's play, the reader is able to piece together a representative variety of emotions that blacks and Lubavitcher Jews felt toward each other. The play also provides many contradictory descriptions of the violence that resulted from these emotions, which helps flesh out the truth of the historical events.”
Rain- Al Sharpton interview
“When Smith performs her play, she acts in the role of each interviewee, embodying his/her voice and movements, and expressing his/her message and personality. These perspectives combine to form a profound explanation of the conflicts between the different Crown Heights communities. Smith examines many of the historical causes of the situation, many of the racial theories that help to explain it, and a broad variety of opinions on the events and people involved, in order to come closer to the truth about what happened and why. Her play, which is the thirteenth part of her unique project On the Road: A Search for the American Character combines journalism and drama in order to examine not just the racial tension and violence in Crown Heights, but much broader themes, including racial, religious, gender, and class identity, and the historical conflict between these communities in the United States. http://www.answers.com/topic/fires-in-the-mirror#Notes_on_Drama ”
Seven Verses
“The first speaker in "Seven Verses" is Professor Leonard Jeffries, who describes his involvement in Roots, the classic book and then television series about the slave trade. Letty Cottin Pogrebin argues in the next scene that blacks attack Jews because Jews are the only racial group that listens to them and views them as full human beings. Minister Conrad Mohammed then outlines his view of the terrible historical suffering by blacks at the hands of whites, stressing that blacks, and not Jews, are God's chosen people.
In the scene "Isaac," Letty Cottin Pogrebin reads a story about her mother's cousin, who participated in Nazi gassing in order to survive the Holocaust. Robert Sherman then contends that the English language is insufficient for describing and understanding race relations.” http://www.answers.com/topic/fires-in-the-mirror-play-3

-approach to characters
-constructing encounters

Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett
Characters:
D- director
A- assistant
P- protagonist
L- Luke in charge of lighting

Rent by Jonathan Larson (“based on La bohème which is an opera in four acts by Giacomo Puccini. The plague of Puccini's opera, is replaced by AIDS in Rent; 1800s Paris is replaced by New York's East Village in the late 1900s. The names and identities of Rent's characters also heavily reflect Puccini's original characters” http://www.answers.com/topic/rent)
Characters:
Mark Cohen, a struggling documentary filmmaker, the narrator of the show and the person who creates a final movie which details his friends' lives and journeys throughout the story.
Roger Davis, an HIV-positive musician who is recovering from heroin addiction; Mark's roommate and Mimi's love interest
Tom Collins, a philosophy teacher and anarchist with AIDS; friend and former roommate of Roger, Mark, Benny, and Maureen; Angel's love interest.
Benjamin "Benny" Coffin III, landlord of Mark, Roger and Mimi's apartment building; ex-roommate of Mark, Collins, Roger, and Maureen. Now married to Alison Grey of the Westport Greys and thus considered a yuppie sell-out.
Joanne Jefferson, a Harvard-educated lawyer; Maureen's lover
Angel Dumott Schunard, a drag queen street percussionist/musician with AIDS; Collins' love interest.
Mimi Marquez, an HIV-positive pole-dancer and heroin junkie; Roger's love interest
Maureen Johnson, a performance artist; Joanne's girlfriend; Mark's ex-girlfriend.

Looking For Richard by Robert Dinero
-love and lust
-accuracy
-realism
-how to approach text

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen
-melodrama and realism