The Hearth Archives - TheaterScene.net

The Hearth

Racecar Racecar Racecar

December 14, 2024

Sarah Blush directs a cast of five in the story of a father and daughter on a road trip from New York City to a storage unit in California. It is a trip that is both se in the present and past, and it is filled with a flow of information that mixes reality with fantasy in a liminal space between sanity and insanity. This story operates from a different dimension the moment one walks into the performance space. The set is a large orange square, shag-carpeted pit with no clues as to the staging. The two principal characters making this trip by car never sit as if they are in a car but casually walk the raised outside edge of the box. It is an element of this stagecraft that adds beautifully to the edginess of the production. [more]

Push Party

June 14, 2024

"Push Party" is a story by Nia Akilah Robinson that reaches into the supportive community spirit that celebrates a woman’s status as a mother, independent of a child or children. It is a story that explores the relationships of a group of friends as they gather to celebrate the impending birth of a new child to one of their numbers, but in this case, a child that has been born but is not yet in the arms of her mother. It would be a relatively simple story if that were the only focus, but Robinson gives something much more with socio-political commentary on the conditions under which pregnant women must endure in a patriarchal society, and most especially, women of color. [more]

For Annie

January 8, 2017

Playwright Beth Hyland’s very effective conceit is that we’re watching the dress rehearsal of Annie Lambert’s memorial celebration in an auditorium of the State University of New York at Onondaga. There, students act out Ms. Lambert’s story in the manner of a Greek chorus often directly addressing the audience. “What would Annie have wanted?” [more]