Theatre Archives

Courage in the Catskills: Casa Valentina at the Provincetown Theater

May 13, 2023

Provincetown Theater’s 2023 season opening couldn’t be more electric… or more riveting. Both heart-affirming and heartbreaking, Casa Valentina is a singularly brilliant tour de force production of an amazing play. It’s summertime in the Catskills in...

The Weird Dark World of Archibald Avery

April 17, 2023

Any writer can identify with the central character’s initial problem in the new musical premiering at Cape Rep in Brewster: he has a deadline, and he’s running out of ideas. From that rather ordinary beginning, though, things spin very quickly out of...

Gorgeous and Poignant: Tiny Beautiful Things at the Provincetown Theater

November 22, 2022

Tiny Beautiful Things doesn’t feel like a standard play (spoiler alert: it isn’t). For one thing, there’s no complex storyline—no plot at all, in fact. With one exception, the characters aren’t fully fleshed out, the audience essentially hears their...

Humanity at its most raw: “The Humans” wows Provincetown

October 24, 2022

Make sure you see The Humans at the Provincetown Theater before joining your family for the holidays; it will reassure you that your people’s insanity is way down on the crazy scale. Dysfunctional family gatherings are a staple of theatre and literature,...

Off With Their Heads! The Revolutionists at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater

August 28, 2022

It is a sad fact that history is always written by the winners, and for many centuries that has meant it’s written by men. The frustrations women feel when they realize their stories aren’t being told, remembered, and celebrated come to the fore in...

A pirate, a witch, and a lot of fun: *From the Heart of the Wreck* at Cape Rep

August 20, 2022

Cape Rep Theatre has a tradition of staging geographically and culturally relevant plays—plays about the fishing industry, plays about Cape Cod history—and its world premiere of From the Heart of the Wreck adds a new star to that firmament. The story...

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...