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The Hamlet Machine

Quantum’s Sleepy “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

by Stuart Sheppard

In drama, interiority always triumphs over exteriority. Just look at Shakespeare (even his history plays), Beckett, or Sophocles. And mystery is always stronger than explication. Who wants to be told what to think? But with Quantum Theatre’s new production of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” we find an inversion of these principals, in that the …

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Learning to Fly, Again: Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Peter Pan” Makes Children of Us All

by Stuart Sheppard

Marcel Proust may have needed a sip of lime-flower tea imbued with madeleine crumbs to trigger the memory of his idyllic childhood, but I found myself just as deliciously transported back to my six-year-old psyche as I watched Pittsburgh Ballet Theater’s magical production of “Peter Pan” in the Benedum Center last week. Had this performance …

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Serious Daddy Issues: Barebones Delivers a Compelling “Crocodile Fever”

by Stuart Sheppard

One of the most difficult questions a drama critic confronts is how much of the plot should be explicated during a review? I think it’s a disservice to reveal too much of a play’s action, as it denies an organic apprehension of the experience. Imagine seeing the film “Jaws” for the first time with all …

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The Moon is Just a World that Never Heals: Quantum Nails O’Neill

by Stuart Sheppard

It is a precept of Zen art to incorporate the spaces between objects into a creation, and to consider them just as significant as the objects depicted. In flower arrangement, for example, the areas between the branches are just as important – if not more so – than the branches themselves. We find the embodiment …

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Theater Roundup: Barebones and Kinetic Kick Off Strong Summer Season

by Stuart Sheppard

One of the greatest joys in attending a theatrical performance is not knowing anything about the show beforehand. This blessing is generally squandered by reviewers who extol plot explication above all other critical duties. Thus, I am torn in describing two excellent shows currently running in Pittsburgh: Barebones Productions’ “The Animal Kingdom,” and Kinetic Theatre …

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Painting the Audience: Quantum’s “Scenes from an Execution” is Artistic Theater

by Stuart Sheppard

Although we can’t prove that Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” we certainly can admit the wisdom in this adage, especially as it concerns the theater, where interpretation has turned into an industry for directors, dramaturgs, audiences, and especially, critics. So rather than write a quotidian, interpretive review, our critic decided to …

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Pittsburgh Public Theater’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” A Sincerely Funny Play

by Stuart Sheppard

There are certain plays we admire for their timeless quality, that somehow not only survive, but thrive over decades, centuries, and even millennia. “Oedipus Rex” and “Hamlet,” for example, have proven themselves in this respect, while others like “Waiting for Godot,” and “American Buffalo” certainly have the potential to join them. Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance …

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An Enchanting Evening in Another World: Chatham Baroque Transports Us to the Realm of Bach

by Stuart Sheppard

Several years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I happened to sit next to an eccentric man on a flight to Boston, who had a large musical instrument occupying the seat next to him. Suspecting that it wasn’t a cello, I asked what it might be, and he said a viola da gamba. I replied, …

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Barebones Delivers a Visceral Portrayal of Working America in “Skeleton Crew”

by Stuart Sheppard

Usually, critics try to bury the lead, but I’m going to say outright that Barebones Productions may be the most authentic theater company in America today. This is not to denigrate any other company, nor to say that Barebones is the best theater company, but what they have done over the past couple of years …

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Pittsburgh Opera Goes Back to the Future with a Moving “Iphigénie En Tauride”

by Stuart Sheppard

The conceit of the “what if” story has always fascinated us: what if Ebenezer Scrooge hadn’t been visited by his ghosts in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” or if George Bailey hadn’t had the intervention of the angel Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or if Marty McFly hadn’t gone back in time to make sure …

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Buying Fragments of God: The Crazy Art World of the 1980s

by Stuart Sheppard

If the 1960s changed America’s consciousness for the better, the 1980s certainly changed American commercialism for the worse. And to have lived during this latter period in New York City was to have felt the first tremors of this change, much like living near the epicenter of an earthquake and experiencing its initial shockwaves before …

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Barebones’ “American Buffalo” is Stunning and Revelatory Theater

by Stuart Sheppard

In trying to describe the essence of strong writing – and ultimately, all art — the poet Wallace Stevens said, “A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect, but most likely, the opposite.” What we have in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” (1975) is the embodiment of this ethos, as the play brings …

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The Stark Relativity of Existence

by Stuart Sheppard

Theatrical advertising today tends to overpromise and underdeliver: old classics are repackaged in the wrappings of contemporary mores, new works are compared to old classics, and hype is so prevalent in promotional campaigns that the laconic nature of Barebones Productions’ marketing for “The Sound Inside” (2018) made me really pay attention. It did not tout …

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Smells Like Dane Spirit

by Stuart Sheppard

In a review of a Shakespeare production several years ago I argued that, as a general rule, it has proven easier to do Shakespeare new rather than well, but with Quantum Theatre’s current production of “Hamlet,” director Jeffrey Carpenter has demonstrated that it’s possible to do both. The challenge with this play — arguably the …

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The Audience as Character: Kinetic Theatre’s “Every Brilliant Thing”

by Stuart Sheppard

There are many reasons to like Kinetic Theatre Company’s “Every Brilliant Thing,” but perhaps the best one is in the way it creates a bonding experience with the audience – rare enough these days — and furthermore, that it does so in a manner that is not political, sentimental, or didactic – the three crutches …

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“We Shall Not Be Moved”

by Stuart Sheppard

Part tragedy and part myth, as well as part history and part prophecy, Pittsburgh Opera’s “We Shall Not Be Moved” (which premiered in 2017) may be one of the most modern theatrical spectacles you will see — with its synthesis of music, singing, dance, and video projection — yet it may also be one of …

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Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre: On the Threshold of a New Era

by Stuart Sheppard

Watching Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s latest production, “Balanchine and Beyond,” reminded me of the first time I saw the work of the visionary film director Sergei Eisenstein, and encountered cinematography as a form of rapture, instead of the mere recording of imagery. PBT’s three-work production — subtitled “The Masters Program” — comprising contemporary, modernist, and neoclassical …

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Sympathy for the Devil: Quantum Theatre Conjures a Postmodern Faust

by Stuart Sheppard

Perhaps the second most essential question in life after “Why are we here?” is “Whom should we trust?” The obvious answer would seem to be, trust in God, but we all know how often human beings end up putting their faith in that more convenient, self-serving, and nefarious alternative, the devil. In fact, one of …

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The War Against Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

by Stuart Sheppard

Often when I walk through a gallery of contemporary art, I can hear a murmuring between the works that echoes journalist Herbert Morrison’s voice describing the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937: “Oh, the humanity!” It’s as if the depiction of suffering in any form has become the criteria by which we judge art, rather …

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Pitt Stages’ “Seven Guitars” Gives Life to a Dream Deferred

by Stuart Sheppard

It has been said that the sign of great actors is that they don’t care if you watch them perform or not – as they disdain “playing to the crowd” — and I would argue that the same can be said of great playwrights, who write in a way that invites you to listen to …

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Pittsburgh Opera’s “Ariodante” – A Sublime Marriage of the 18^th and 21^st Centuries

by Stuart Sheppard

Nearly a century ago, the iconoclastic dramatist Bertolt Brecht wrote that “Since it is precisely for its backwardness that the opera-going public adores opera, an influx of new types of listener with new appetites has to be reckoned with; and so it is.” This is a felicitous way to describe what Pittsburgh Opera has done …

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Quantum’s “The Cherry Orchard” is Brilliantly Inscrutable

by Stuart Sheppard

Often in theater, the more mundane the plot, the more iconoclastic the drama. Thus, if “Hamlet” is essentially about a man who cannot make up his mind, and in “Waiting For Godot” we watch nothing happen, twice, then “The Cherry Orchard” offers us four acts about the refinancing of a mortgage in arrears. What could …

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