A Theatre-Goer's Thoughts

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. The novella has been a staple of Christmas celebrations ever since. There have been numerous iterations of the story as a play and as a film. I daresay that Dickens’s “ghost story of Christmas” might be almost as universally known as that other Christmas story with shepherds and wise men. The name “Scrooge” has become synonymous with the miserly penny-pincher or the disagreeably dour, and inextricably linked with his trademark put-down: “Bah, humbug!” The story is deceptively simple. On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts. First, the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley’s Ghost explains that there will be three more visitors, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Each of the ghosts will show Scrooge as he was, as he is, and as he may be, if he does not alter his behavior. He is specifically shown himself as a youth in the Past, and his nephew Fred and the family of his clerk, Bob ...

  Debashis Roy Chowdhury as Pishe, Abrar Haque as Choton, Jakeem Dante Powell as Raheem, and Gargi Mukherjee as Pishimoni in Public Obscenities at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane, Theatre may be the best way for us to understand other people, other times, other cultures, in a more immediate and personal way than reading about it or seeing a documentary, because in real time we are watching and getting to know people who are living in that “other” culture.  Public Obscenities , the current offering at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, is an excellent example of an audience being exposed to a very different world than the one in which it lives. Public Obscenities  is written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury. This production is a partnership between Woolly Mammoth, Soho Rep, and the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) National Partnership Project, and co-presented with Theatre for a New Audience. The play enjoyed ...

  The cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning  Fat Ham  playing charades at Studio Theatre. Photo credit: Martha Schulman. The day after I saw Studio Theatre’s production of Fat Ham , the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner in Drama by James Ijames, I received an advertisement for the production with the tag line: “Revenge is a dish best served with BBQ sauce.” That, in a nutshell, symbolizes the difference between this play and Shakespeare’s Hamlet . There are numerous parallels between the two. Both are stories about dysfunctional families in which a son is charged with avenging his father’s death, but one is set in the Danish court and the other in the backyard of “a house in North Carolina, or Virginia, or Maryland, or Tennessee.” Hamlet ’s geographic location is immaterial (there is nothing very Danish about it), but Fat Ham ’s is not: we are definitely somewhere in the South, though not necessarily the deepest South. As the play begins, Juicy, a Black, Queer young man most like...

  The cast of Ragtime in the opening scene at Signature Theatre. Photo credit: Christopher Mueller. The MAX theatre space at Arlington’s Signature Theatre is a place where magic happens on a regular basis. Having seen probably more than 20 productions at Signature, I have mostly been rapturously moved and completely involved in the performance.  My last trip to the MAX was for The Bridges of Madison County , a charming, lushly scored, romantic drama played out by a cast of seven in what seemed like a most intimate space. The current occupant of the MAX is the epic Ragtime , a huge, sweeping musical that captures moments in the early part of the 20 th century, adapted from a novel by E. L. Doctorow. Where Bridges was intimate and personal, Ragtime is fictional history or historical fiction – based on real circumstances but with fictional characters and enough “real-life” personalities and events that it almost seems like a documentary, or a docu-musical. Doctorow provid...