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A group you might not have heard of, Diogenes Theatre Company, is establishing a solid reputation with its recent production of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 and its current staging of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, featuring three professional actors you will know if you’re a regular Cincinnati theatergoer. It’s an award-winning moral thriller that explores the aftermath of violence and the uncertainties of truth and justice. Set in a Latin American country, perhaps Chile, it’s about a woman who was once the prisoner of a cruel dictatorship. Years later, a man visits her home who she’s convinced was her torturer. She turns the table on him. Annie Fitzpatrick is the woman; Giles Davies is the man she believes to be her captor; Michael G. Bath plays her government official husband who is caught in the middle. Diogenes has strong ties with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, and the connections are evident. This production is staged by Lindsay Augusta Mercer, CSC’s resident assistant director, and Brian Phillips, CSC’s producing artistic director, is an artistic consultant. This taut drama, presented at the Aronoff’s Jarson-Kaplan Theater, is definitely worth seeing. Tickets: 513-621-2787.
If you’re into works that are hot off the press, you have this weekend to still catch productions at Northern Kentucky University’s Y.E.S. Festival, onstage through Sunday. The best of them is Colin Speers Crowley’s Encore, Encore, making its final performances on Saturday at 8 p.m. It’s about the caustic drama critic Dorothy Parker and her sad, failed marriage; well-written and sparklingly performed by a student cast, directed by Ed Cohen. Read my review here. Tickets: 859-572-5464.
Another student production is onstage at UC’s Cohen Family Studio Theater at CCM: You’re Welcome (a cycle of bad plays). It’s a set of five small plays — intentionally silly and misshapen, with directors and stage managers wandering on and off and cutting things short or addressing malfunctions — that’s as silly as it is amusing. In a bit more than an hour it covers love, death, desire, tragedy, comedy, drunk driving, sexiness, beauty, loss and the battle between good an evil. There’s also a fog machine that works (occasionally) and a T-shirt cannon. Give yourself into the madness and you’ll have fun; don’t look for a lot of close meaning. But the student actors are great fun to watch, especially Bartley Booz’s start-and-stop curtain speech at the beginning, which gives away (intentionally) most of what’s to follow. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Admission is free, but reservations are required: 513-556-4183.
If you’re an adventurer who likes unusual performance experiences, you should look into getting a ticket from the Contemporary Arts Center for the bus to Batavia tonight or Saturday evening. That’s where you’ll take a walk in the woods to see a piece of performance art imported from Norway: Ingrid Fiksdal’s Night Tripper. No spoken words, but intriguing and mystical dance and music elements, combined with the natural environment. It sounds fascinating; read more about it here. Tickets via the CAC’s website.
Queen City Flash, the flash-mob styled theater company that took off last fall is back with The Complete Tom: 2. Huckleberry, based on Mark Twain’s stories about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, adapted by Trey Tatum. It gets underway on Monday and continues through May 9. Here’s the catch: free tickets are reserved at QueenCityFlash.com for the date and time of your choice; at 4 p.m. on the day of the show, you’ll receive an email with a map and parking instructions to a secret outdoor location. Unusual, but intriguing.
Two productions are wrapping up this weekend: The very funny farce by Steve Martin, The Underpants, at The Carnegie in Covington [read my review here] and David Mamet’s very taut drama Race, presented by New Edgecliff Theatre at the Hoffner Lodge on Hamilton Avenue in Northside.
Rick Pender’s STAGE DOOR blog appears here every Friday. Find more theater reviews and feature stories here.
RICK PENDER has written about theater for CityBeat since its first issues in 1994. Before that he wrote for EveryBody’s News. From 1998 to 2006 he was CityBeat’s arts & entertainment editor. Retired...
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