Michelle Wilson

Our Town

October 26, 2024

Wilder’s experimental play uses no scenery except for two tables, some chairs, a piano and usually two ladders for the upstairs bedroom windows of the young people. Here, however, Leon and set designer Beowulf Boritt have eliminated the ladders for two windows that open in the wooden back wall. Parsons’ description of the town and the street is so vivid that your imagination sees all that is meant to be there. Many of the stage effects are created by Allen Lee Hughes’ subtle lighting plot which takes us back to the end of the last century with lanterns both on the footlights and in Parsons’ hand. Leon has also added another one of the five senses by piping in the odors of heliotrope, vanilla, and bacon, one in each act. Professor Willard is here played by a woman, and as John McGinty playing milkman Howie Newsome is hearing challenged, the other actors speak to him in sign language, a new effect for this drama. [more]

The Fires

May 28, 2024

Raja Feather Kelly, an award-winning choreographer of recent Broadway musicals "A Strange Loop" and "Lempicka," as well as "Teeth," the recent Playwrights Horizons success imminently getting a commercial Off-Broadway run, makes his debut as a playwright with "The Fires," a work drenched in sorrow. The play examines three, actually four, Black men who inhabit the same third floor South Brooklyn railroad apartment in vastly different eras: 1974, 1998 and 2021. [more]

The Coast Starlight

March 20, 2023

When it comes to plot, characters, or often both, even the best theater tends to require a suspension of disbelief. Given that it's hardly a sucker's bet for indolent playwrights to pin their hopes on the lack of effort it requires an audience not to think, what Keith Bunin does in "The Coast Starlight" is astonishing. Taking its title from the Amtrak overnight sleeper that scenically services an ocean-hugging route from Los Angeles to Seattle, the play is primarily set in one of the train's coach cars, where the passengers, a group of strangers, are reluctant to break the silence between them. Mostly, like real human beings, they don't, or at least not when it might have done some good. [more]

Confederates

April 12, 2022

Dominique Morisseau’s "Confederates," her second play of her Signature Theatre Residency 5, is a clever, but overly talky dissertation on race, power and family. She offers the audience parallel stories alternating between the Civil War era and modern day academia. The contemporary plot involves Sandra (Michelle Wilson, solid), a Black political science professor who is the victim of a racist insult. A period photograph of a slave wet nurse, white infant attached to her breast, was altered to superimpose her head on the slave’s. Finding the culprit spurs Sandra to think about the precariousness of being a Black woman in academia. [more]

The House That Will Not Stand

August 7, 2018

Gardley makes use of a little known piece of American history: while Louisiana was under Spanish and later French rule, it had a three-tiered racial system. Aside from white settlers and black slaves, there was a third class: free women of color (mostly Creoles) could enter into a relationship with white men as common-law wives. Their children could inherit part of their estates. Some of these so-called “colored” women became extremely rich. This system was called plaçage and such women were known as placeés. The lighter the woman’s skin color the higher her social caste. However, when Louisiana was sold to the new United States in 1803, this system was frowned upon and eventually went out of style around 1813 due to legal challenges. [more]

Sweat

November 12, 2016

"Sweat," which won the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, is reputed inspired by interviews conducted by playwright Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey in Reading, Pennsylvania, named the poorest city in America in 2011. By 2007, Reading had seen its factories and mills closing as NAFTA and globalization made it cheaper to produce goods in Mexico or China, without offering its residents anything but unemployment insurance. The play could probably have taken place in one of a dozen places in the Rust Belt. "Sweat"’s main characters are all eventually affected by this downward trend in a community that has few opportunities. [more]