Jonathan Weber Archives - TheaterScene.net

Jonathan Weber

Fog and Filthy Air

March 14, 2025

It is essential for the audience to become fully engaged with the story and to care about the characters. When that does not happen, the show falls flat. While Homeyer and McGrath make an effort as Father and Mother, they are saddled with one-dimensional characters whose interactions lack chemistry. Gamble’s character is more developed but lacks a believable emotional connection with the other two. The dialogue touches on emotional issues within the family but does not effectively build dramatic tension with those issues. In the final analysis, the play lacks a compelling emotional hook. [more]

A Healthy House

June 7, 2022

Diriwachter is particularly skilled in writing working class vernacular. The Father and Tim speak the same language and he catches all the subtleties of decades of ups and downs. He also is wonderful with the two salesmen, cleverly finding the rhythm of their spiels that build up to the final pitches. His salespeople are written as clever but not unfeeling so that the audience never totally believes that the Father and son are being betrayed and cheated. [more]

Thelonious!

February 18, 2019

Welch and the play’s director, Jonathan Weber, seem to be going for a sort of Ionesco-esque ambience here. The story unfolds in a broadly played, cartoonish way. Occasionally, a satirical jab at ivory-tower academics will land, thanks to Welch’s depiction of the shallow and creepy professor, who—as played by the bearded Slone—looks like he just stepped out of a daguerrotype. But, generally speaking, this comedy is rambling, unwieldy and not especially funny. (Few audience laughs were audible during the performance under review.) In the last stretches of the play, a meta element is introduced, with the characters talking about having entered “the epilogue” stage of the story. Once we’ve stumbled into this self-referential territory, it becomes even harder to engage in any real way with the play. [more]