Theatre Archives

When You Can’t Look Away: Frozen at the Harbor Stage

August 15, 2022

One has to start with a trigger warning: Bryony Lavery’s play Frozen could be quite difficult for some people to watch, dealing as it does—intimately—with pedophilia and serial murder. None of that is immediately obvious to the audience; as the play...

Revisiting Groundbreaking Theatre: Jerker

August 15, 2022

It’s a story far too familiar to a Provincetown audience: casual intimacy and death by plague. But Robert Chesley’s Jerker manages to explain and defy both in ways that aren’t immediately obvious—and ultimately quite poignant. The story is simple: JR...

A Sequel That Couldn’t Be More Timely

July 29, 2022

History may always be written by the winners, but often it’s the observations of the common people that are more interesting—and understandable. And that’s what playwright Taylor Mac gives us in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, now at the Wellfleet...

The Ballad of Bobby Botswain is brilliant

July 18, 2022

Two men meet in a bar. It’s the opening to many a story that at least one of the participants is going to later regret. That’s fortunately not the case in The Ballad of Bobby Botswain, the Harbor Stage Company’s current world première and the sort of...

Marry Me A Little Packs A Lot

July 2, 2022

In bringing Craig Lucas and Norman René’s stylish Marry Me A Little Stephen Sondheim revue to the stage at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, artistic director Christopher Ostrom is taking a chance. Perhaps that’s what he’s known for; his most...

That’s No Lady: The Lady Hamlet at the Provincetown Theater

June 29, 2022

We are living through dark times. The week before the world première of The Lady Hamlet opened at the Provincetown Theater, the United States Supreme Court decided that women are now to be considered legally lesser humans. It’s easy to find oneself mired...

Buried Child at Harbor Stage is Buried Treasure

June 24, 2022

It’s telling that as the audience files in to see Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-prizewinning play, Buried Child, at the Harbor Stage Company, they must put on masks and have their vaccination credentials examined: our time is not so very different from the world...

The Provincetown Theater

June 12, 2022

By Byron Crawford The artists washed up on the shores of Provincetown in waves. First came the painters following their prophet Charles Hawthorn. Close on their heels came actors, writers, and colorful personalities that would form the foundations of a...

Pranks and Pressure: “Straight White Men” at WHAT

June 5, 2022

The contrast couldn’t be more stark: as the audience enters, it’s greeted by over-loud rap music (performed by women and people of color) and taken on a tour of the play’s premises by two people who are clearly not straight white men; and then Justin...