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"TWIGS AND BONE is not the first play to put a make-believe baby on stage, but it may be the most hair-raising. This particular phantom infant, conceived by playwright Tiffany Antone, figures prominently and paranormally in a gothic family drama...a gripping ghost story that explodes in your brain.... We are in the childhood home of Moira, now a 30ish lawyer, who has not been back in eight years but has been paying for a landline and a succession of cleaners to help out her demented parents, Bonnie and William. Alarmed when the phone is cut off and having no other way to reach them, Moira shows up for what will be a horrific three-day visit full of recollected resentments, delusions, and downright scary plot twists.... What lifts this family's epic meltdown from excruciating to riveting is not only the astonishing storyline (which I'll not reveal) and delectably idiosyncratic characters but also Antone's exquisite writing. Tucked among the dialog is some breathtaking poetry and imagery.... ...what [is] indisputable is that TWIGS AND BONE is as sturdy a psychological thriller as has ever been seen in American theater."John Stoltenberg, DC Theater Arts
"Mr Spock likely would have raised an eyebrow and proclaimed th[is] play 'fascinating.' LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI zips issues of immigration, race, gender, ethnicity, genetics, demographics, history, politics and economics, to name just a few, into space suits for a dark comedy set in a not-so-appealing future. There's definitely a lot to think about in this highly imaginative and sometimes quite biting work. The titular ship is one of several launched on a mission to save thousands of humans from a planet Earth that's no longer inhabitable. Rotating crews, who are otherwise suspended in a life-extending "stasis," take the con as millennia pass. After an unexpected delay, the last ship gets a signal from planet Proxima Centauri, and the two on-duty crew members celebrate madly. Not so fast. In author Lam's Clauder Competition-winning creation, the current inhabitants of the planet have several rather probing questions they'd like to ask before their "committee" decides if the new arrivals will be welcomed. For example, why is this ship from America populated mostly by privileged white people while the new world of Proxima Centauri is in the hands of people who came from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds? Who takes on the role of "outsiders" in this new world? The planetary tables have been turned. But is the new order on Proxima any better? The author relentlessly pulls on these threads while the action of a hard landing on a distant planet plays out."Steve Feeny, Portland Press Herald "...Greg Lam's dark-comic sci-fi drama LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI. A Clauder Competition winner, this [is a] pointed and very entertaining show.... Like all good science fiction, LAST SHIP provides a fantasy world of cultural inversions and alternatives, the better for us to consider our own reality. In this case, Lam gives us an opportunity to rethink American culture by watching what happens when white Euro-Americans show up as refugees in a society that wasn't settled by white people, a society whose historical memory of white America includes some Frasier, but a lot more colonialist violence. LAST SHIP channels classic sci-fi tropes to pose challenging questions about race, immigration ethics and politics, the legacy of hegemony, and the plasticity of historical narrative.... In his storytelling, Lam deepens these genre hijinks with his rich world-building of the new planet, which is multicultural...but definitely not utopian-kind of like Hawaii under the rule of Chairman Mao.... LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI continues the sci-fi tradition of letting the last frontier take us back, however uncomfortably, to our own home-to seeing how it might look from a distance, and from the outside."Megan Grumbling, Portland Phoenix
"In Michael Benjamin Washington's absorbing new play about an all-but-forgotten civil rights leader, one of the biggest moments in the fight for racial equality comes off despite-or perhaps because of-a crisis of faith. Faith, in fact, becomes a key motif coursing through BLUEPRINTS TO FREEDOM: An Ode to Bayard Rustin. There's the faith that other African-American activists place in Rustin to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, despite plenty of agonized mutual history. There's the broader faith in the idea that such an action can make a difference, with discrimination and segregation still pervasive in America 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. And then there's Rustin's own deep Christian faith, shattered (by his count) 669 days before the play begins, when he was forced to quit the Southern Christian Leadership Council over worries about publicity concerning his private life. Rustin, a pillar of the civil-rights movement who died in 1987, was a gay man (more or less openly so) in a time when that was difficult even for someone not already facing bigotry. That aspect of his identity helps explain why his name has faded from our nation's roll call of those who led the movement in the 1960s. The play...is an often lyrical, dialogue-rich piece of work whose political sweep and sense of building momentum is reminiscent of ALL THE WAY, Robert Schenkkan's 2014 Tony Award-winner about President Johnson's push to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.... [There is] humor, too. When Rustin's bright young assistant, Miriam Caldwell, asks Rustin and his mentor, A Philip Randolph, why they speak so formally, Randolph replies that it's a nod of respect to their ancestors. Rustin's response: 'I do it to confuse white people'. (After a pause, he adds: 'I speak this way aloud because I speak this way to God'.) Despite the triumphant notes around the march, which drew a quarter-million people, there's a storm yet to come in BLUEPRINTS. There's always another storm to come, as the 'Black Lives Matter' movement can attest today. BLUEPRINTS bears witness that history matters, too."James Hebert, The San Diego Union-Tribune
"In some ways, it's their funniest presentation yet… With a musical score that gives the script bite and zest, the three performers 'turn history inside out and upside down, cramming 1,000 facts into 90 minutes.' By the end they have given us a nonsensical but hilarious rendition of each major epoch."Andrew Warshaw, The Guardian "Singing that 'history ain't what it used to be' the three-person ensemble put a deranged spin on the events of the past 1,000 years… Mixing broad physical humor with sly satire, the three sang, disco-danced and adopted phony accents and even phonier facial hair to view the highlights (and low points) of history, from Leif Ericsson to the Y2K bug… The show was consistently hilarious."Donna Freedman, Anchorage Daily News "The show, overall, is a riot… Don't miss it. After all, a comedy this funny only comes along once or twice a millennium."Patrick Meighan, New Hampshire Telegraph "…combining smarty-pants irreverence with physical buffoonery and street-wise smarts … it touches greatness."Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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