Season Sleeper
Pvt. Wars
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Here's hoping the future of the Horizons Repertory is more interesting than this inaugural production. Its mission statement, "to create a venue that will utilize South Florida talent in order to develop a professional nonprofit repertory company," is a fine one. There's a great deal of theatrical talent in South Florida, and my biggest frustration is that it so seldom is put to the best use. Horizons Rep has already signed up two of my favorite actors -- Sharón Kremen and Lisa Morgan. The Little Stage at the Acorns Civic Theatre, where the company performs, is an underutilized but potentially charming site. With these good ideas going for it, it's too bad the rest of their upcoming program looks as stiflingly boring as Pvt. Wars.
In addition to works by John Patrick Shanley and Lanford Wilson, two of the dullest commercially successful playwrights writing today, Horizons is also presenting an obscure-for-good-reason Tennessee Williams play (Something Cloudy, Something Clear), and two other perennial small-theater favorites that need to be permanently shelved: Pam Gems' Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, and Darlene Craviotto's Pizza Man. (Let me give you a nudge in the direction of Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Park, Hanif Kureishi, Anna Deavere Smith, Derek Walcott, David Henry Hwang, Athol Fugard, and Culture Clash.) The plays Horizons has picked are the choices of young, middle-class white suburbanites who are not looking at the world around them with discerning eyes. For John Patrick Shanley, you want me to get off the couch? No thanks. I'll be at home on the couch, watching Will & Grace.
