Arts & Culture
‘The Royale’s’ Bold Exploration of Jim Crow America
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The acting is in-your-face, stirring and genuine.
Arts & Culture
‘The Piano Teacher’ Falls Flat
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My experience at the Kitchen Theatre Company’s The Piano Teacher was so disorienting that I find it quite difficult to put my feelings to words
1978 Tony
Ithaca Talent Shines in Deathtrap
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A staged reading is always a dangerous route to take for actor and directors. In this format the performers’ physicality and intentions are focused towards the script in their hands, which can make them feel immobilized and their characters seem flat. It is especially courageous to put up a staged reading of a play with the notoriety of Deathtrap, which won the 1978 Tony Award for Best Play for playwright Ira Levin. A significant portion of the room has most likely already seen this Broadway classic produced by a full production team with seasoned actors who’ve had at least a few more weeks to memorize, stage, and color their performances. Luckily, local Ithaca theatre troupe The Homecoming Players casts a group of extraordinary actors, who successfully turn what could have been a long night at the Kitchen Theatre into a romp of suspense and hilarity.
Arts & Culture
Please Not Seventeen Again: I and You at the Kitchen Theatre
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By EMILY KLING
It’s hard to be 17. To be full of angst, uncertainty and covered in acne; to be stuck with some childlike tendencies; to desperately crave attention while simultaneously needing to be left alone. Although teenage years are exhausting, however, they can be a fun age too — full of excitement and possibilities. Unfortunately, as it would turn out, it’s really just tiring to watch. At least this was the case in Lauren Gunderson’s one-act I and You, opening this Thursday at the Kitchen Theatre.
Arts & Culture
The Mountaintop Dazzles the Kitchen Theatre
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By NICK SWAN
In a display of brilliance that was at once both profoundly sobering and yet promisingly optimistic, the Kitchen Theatre of downtown Ithaca opened their production run of playwright Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop on Thursday. The Mountaintop is Katori Hall’s dramatized and imagined account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last night alive, on April 3, 1968. The play takes place entirely within the stained, yellowing walls of a musty room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. At the drama’s beginning, an exhausted Dr. King enters the room, returning from a rally earlier that evening, and yells out the front door, urging his close friend Ralph Abernathy to go purchase cigarettes. When he closes the door, he proceeds to read from his notes on a sermon he is planning to give in the following days.