REVIEW: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ @ A Noise Within

Reviews · Theater
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When A Raisin in the Sun was first performed on Broadway in 1959, it became a landmark. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to author a Broadway play, and at 29, she became the youngest playwright to receive New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. While the setting of the piece ...

Review: Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’ @ A Noise Within

Reviews · Theater
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Jean Genet had a remarkable career – a thief, a jailbird, an internationally celebrated playwright whose work often embodied his compatriot’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.” That was from Sartre’s play “No Exit,” and Genet’s play “The Maids” (1947) depicts a particularly suffocating hell. Two sisters, maids in a bourgeois French household ...

Arts ladies of the weekend 2

Dance · Reviews · Theater
It gave pleasure, in disparate performances over the weekend, to find and then ruminate on two outstanding players — both exemplary contributors operating in a mixed terrain. The duo included dancer Taisha Paggett and actress Carolyn Ratteray, both top notch, both, by happenstance, African-American artists. Ms. Paggett appears to be the muse of the savvy ...

Happy 100th birthday, Tennessee Williams 1

Theater
Two terrific Tennessee Williams shows are on right now, and what a lovely way to gain exposure to our great southern playwright, born March 26, 1911, who would turn one hundred years old this Saturday had he not choked on the cap of his eyedrop squeezer in 1981. But that’s a story for another time. ...