by Barbara Waldinger “I live off the suffering of strangers.  I build a career on the sorrows of people I don’t know and will never see again. . . I’m such a fraud.” These concerns are expressed by international photojournalist Sarah Goodman in a revealing moment as she recuperates from…

by Macey Levin   First came the earthquake, then the tsunami that devastated villages, inundated farms, caused massive beach erosion and flooded a nuclear power plant along the English coast.  All this occurs before the beginning of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, a provocative play currently enjoying an intelligent and engrossing…

by Macey Levin   Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery had its off-Broadway debut in 2000 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize the following year. It dramatizes the story of Gladys Green who, over a two-year period, slips from mild senility to full-blown dementia. The original production and the recent…

by Roseann Cane “There is nothing permanent except change.”  –Heraclitus As the lights come up we see two people, a mature woman wrapped in a mink and a handsome man on the outskirts of middle age, peering into the distance. They stand parallel, about a couple of yards apart, in…

by Barbara Waldinger In a recent interview with the Times Union, Nicole Ricciardi, director of Shakespeare & Company’s current production of Creditors, describes the play as “one ninety-minute song.” Despite the fact that there is no music, Ricciardi and her consummate cast devote themselves to “following the rhythm” in Strindberg’s…

by Barbara Waldinger For its first production of the 2018 season, Shakespeare & Company dispenses with kings, queens and wars, instead seeking a perfect marriage between the characters depicted onstage and the viewing audience.  Although, alas, no perfect marriage exists for the three mature characters in Carey Crim’s Morning After…