FOR THE FUN OF IT.... For old-fashioned comedy, in old-fashioned summer stock style, in an old-fashioned summer theater look no further than ARSENIC AND OLD LACE on the Fitzpatrick Main Stage of the Berkshire Theater Group in Stockbridge. Forget the parallels between a heavy-headed world of 1939 when ARSENIC AND OLD LACE was first staged and today – just forget all about today – and surrender to the timeless, silly delight of Joseph Kesselring’s tale of the loony, homicida

TAKING STEPS: ALL UPS AND DOWNS Barrington Stage Company’s production of prolific British playwright Alan Ackybourn’s farce TAKING STEPS is more interesting than entertaining. It’s funny enough, but it’s like watching inside-baseball theater. The playwriting emerges like parody of farce and the direction presents like a puzzle of stage-blocking cleverly solved. First produced in England in 1980, TAKING STEPS has been rarely seen in the US since a brief Broadway run in 199

A director’s statement in a theater program shouldn’t articulate the playwright’s work better than what’s on stage, but sadly that's the case with a static, tedious production of Pulitzer-Prize winning Lynn Nottage’s INTIMATE APPAREL at Shakespeare & Company. With an internalized conflict on one end and multiple, lofty themes on the other, in the absence of deft staging and and nimble cast, there’s dead space in between. At the Bernstein Theatre on S&C’s Lenox campus, IN

Theater lovers like myself who love theater because it takes us to a place we can’t get to on our own will love Frank Boyd’s THE HOLLER SESSIONS, in too brief a run at the Ancram Opera House. Frank loves jazz because it takes him to a place he can’t get to on his own. For about 80 minutes, Boyd, who conceived and wrote THE HOLLER SESSIONS, also plays radio host Ray (but I really thought of him as Frank, so I'm calling him that) in the lonely, timeless, graveyard hours of t

BELLS ARE RINGING From its very start when a wacky Mrs. Bennett, mother to four husband-less daughters and fit-to-be tied about it, comes screaming across the lawn furiously clanging a large, hand-held bell, one knows this PRIDE & PREJUDICE is unlike any adaption of the Jane Austen classic one has seen before. Playwright Kate Hamill, who inventively adapted Austen’s SENSE & SENSIBILITY for Bedlam and most recently Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR at the (now sadly defunct) Pearl, is

SHARON PLAYHOUSE: WTF? “Does anyone still wear a hat?”* Prisoners on their way to execution do - and big fancy ones at that - at Sharon Playhouse in an incomprehensible production of Caryl Churchill’s FAR AWAY. For the British playwright’s fans, myself included, or seasoned theatergoers accustomed to Churchill’s ambiguous narratives, even her most popular works - CLOUD NINE, TOP GIRLS, and most recently ESCAPED ALONE - can be demanding . This lesser-known work, a 45-minut

SONG OF OURSELVES Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s I AND YOU, which launches Chester Theatre Company’s summer season, is a little marvel. With earnest and disarming quiet, Gunderson renders a poignant, incisive portrait of immortality from two ostensibly disparate topics - teenage relationships and the poetry of Walt Whitman. High-schooler Anthony arrives at the door of schoolmate Caroline, sick and housebound, looking for a partner for his assignment about Whitman’s”Leaves o