Tagged: The Bard's Town

“George Washington in the Garden of Eden” opens the show with a creation story. James Garfield’s “Dance of a Thousand Ironies” is a tragic ballet. Thomas Jefferson isn't memorialized, he's roasted, stand-up comedy-style, by Benjamin Franklin. 

The Neo-Futurists of Chicago premiered "43 Plays for 43 Presidents" ten years ago (Actors Theatre of Louisville staged a production in 2008) with a brief play for each occupant of the Oval Office—Grover Cleveland gets two, since his terms weren't consecutive.

In “Time Flies,” four time travelers wander from their births back to the beginning of the universe and forward to the end of time. Along the way, they stage a hip hop tribute to a famous clock maker and engage in a bout of bare-knuckle boxing.

In other words, it’s a typical absurdist Le Petomane show. Co-producing artistic director Kyle Ware says this play is a study in anachronism, with philosophical undercurrents.

The Bard’s Town Theatre broadens its focus this season with an outstanding production of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise.” This tightly-wound family drama about a disgraced evangelical who takes a job at an Idaho Hobby Lobby won an Obie Award in 2011 and has enjoyed a number of exciting regional premieres over the last season by companies like Washington, D.C.’s Wooly Mammoth Theatre and Chicago’s LiveWire.

Are women funny? Every few years, another male writer or comic says no – Jerry Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, most recently, Adam Carolla.

Janelle Fitzpatrick disagrees. She’s a high school teacher who works with incarcerated youth in Indiana. Her day job can be intense, so a few years ago she tried her hand at stand-up comedy and found a second calling.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. 2,500 years after Aristophanes first suggested women could end a war by kicking powerful husbands out of their beds in “Lysistrata,” the idea is still compelling to playwrights and politicians alike (a Michigan state representative recently suggested a similar strategy).