Live theater has never been a big draw in South Florida, an area not usually recognized as a center for first-class theatrical performances. Independent arts organizations in general have a hard time just staying afloat — witness the shuttering of the Alliance Cinema’s doors last week. Yet several nonprofit local…

You could say Shirley Richardson has a theatrical heritage. Growing up in Miami in the ’50s and ’60s, her entire family worked for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, either as domestic or manual laborers. Her mother, Bennie Mae, was a cleaning woman at the playhouse from 1954 to 1964 and often…

Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in either of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…

In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of sacrifice, the young writer finally publishes his first novel and becomes an overnight sensation. Soon the mysterious and…

It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights for which U.S. settlers fought after freedom of speech was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, a love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and…

The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form on stage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and…

As the house lights go up at the end of Brief Encounters, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s second annual one-acts festival, the cast shuffles on stage, folding chairs in tow. Each Friday night of the three-week festival, audience members can stick around to ask questions and chat with the cast. The…

Remember that instantly evaporating pop hit from the early ’80s, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? If ever there were a comparable anthem for the relationship of the small screen to the stage, it would be Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. The backstage comedy that hit Broadway in 1991 pits art…

While not adhering to any particular theme, the playbill for Brief Encounters: A Festival of One-Act Plays at the Lake Worth Playhouse promises several potentially seductive scripts. Of the 18 one-act plays performed throughout the festival, several deal with interpersonal relationships. Seduction, obsession, and betrayal are just a few of…

While some critics would say Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark tales are not of this world, The House of the Seven Gables reveals a work very much of two worlds, or rather two Americas — the new and the old. Woven from the black cloak of Calvinism but enlightened by the threads…

The key to great parody is that it hits home in contemporary society. Although Cuban playwright Rolando Ferrer’s play Lila, la Mariposa (Lila, the Butterfly) was meant to be a criticism of Havana and the 1950s when it was first written back in 1954, Teatro Avante’s rendition continues the tradition…

Raving MadTen years ago Kevin Crawford helped found Palm Beach County’s annual Shakespeare by the Sea festival, the prevailing mission of which is to present classic plays, mainly those penned by the Bard. But that definitely doesn’t mean stodgy versions featuring powdered-wigged maidens and men in tights. How about Hamlet…

Walking out of the Caldwell Theatre’s production of Snakebit, you can be certain that you will not hear a playgoer over age 60 sigh, “Ahhh! To be young again!” This hard-hitting drama leaves no room to fantasize about the potency and possibility of the thirties. Playwright David Marshall Grant’s increasingly…

A strong monologue, very much like a steaming jazz solo, should always seem improvisational, even if it’s not. Like music it moves and gathers momentum and, in doing so, meaning. No long-winded plot summary or pedantic sermon, the final monologue in GableStage’s production of Warren Leight’s Side Man does its…

Occasionally something happens as it should. South Florida is quickly becoming home to some of the best Hispanic theater in the nation. In its 15th year, the International Hispanic Theatre Festival, which concluded June 18, consisted of 15 productions from 10 countries. The festival was the largest and most prominent…

We take a seat in front of the screen, stage, or box to disengage. Sometimes it has to do with art — a riveting portrayal of the human drama — sometimes not. TV and film provide many ways to disengage, through electronic hypnosis, surround-sound inoculation, big-screen digital imagery, and the…

If all the world’s a stage, then surely a courtroom is the place to see some of the best drama. Just think of Johnnie Cochran, striding across a courtroom and slamming down his briefcase, or O.J. Simpson, struggling to squeeze his huge hand into the glove that didn’t fit. A…

Remember Love, American Style? It was a lighthearted attempt at feminism and gender bending, which somehow always ended up in bawdy, wide-angle shots of breasts and behinds and concluded in catty dialogues that took place in a huge brass four-poster bed. As a youngster I tuned in for the opening…

Over the River and Through the Woods (written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Kenneth Kay) is one of those plays that you walk out of saying, “Gee, my mother would have loved that,” and lo and behold, you look around and there is your mother — and all of…

Before Women Who Love Too Much and Codependent No More, there was Georgia O’Keeffe and her watercolors. Characteristically dressed in a long black sweater, O’Keeffe peers out at the audience from the dimly lit stage of the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre. “Watercolors are tricky,” she observes in Lucinda McDermott’s O’Keeffe. “When…

Only in Miami does the theater of daily life compete with professional theater for the spotlight — and win. On the way to see the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s production of Praying With the Enemy, I witness what could be a motorcade, if something were leading it. Flags are everywhere: American…

Immigration is a physical act. A body of water is crossed; a mountain range grows smaller and smaller until it appears to be the knuckles of a hand resting on the earth. A dissonant jumble of consonants and vowels seeps into our thoughts until our dreams are flooded. We fall…