Performing Arts

Dealing with heavy themes like sex, money, trust, and the nebulous transition from adolescence to adulthood, Speech & Debate doesn’t pull any punches just because the roles are played by teenagers.

Sixteen in Ten Minutes or Less takes you back to those tumultuous times with a series of 10 minute plays intertwining the lives and complications of a group of teenagers dealing with everything from bullies to braces.

Rising to the occasion is Akintunde, whose goal to revolutionize the Christian entertainment industry results in a stand-up routine carefully balanced between edgy and family-friendly.

“24/7 (2013) flips the paradigm,” Ray Nedzel said, noting that actors and writers typically audition and submit works to critical producers. “24/7 guarantees that new work will be produced, that actors will land their roles. The artists, in turn, commit completely, “and they do it with conviction, guts and expertise each time.”

William Wycherley’s Restoration farce, The Country Wife, offers a plethora of lewd puns, lascivious innuendo, and outright ribaldry in a classically structured, three-fold plot as it plays out the stories of rakish Harry Horner and his ambitious plans to bed as many of London’s finest ladies as possible with a devious angle.

Stanley Ann Dunham falls in love and marries a Kenyan student in the early ’60s. She struggles through a second marriage to a corrupt civil servant in Indonesia, and comes through it to work in anthropology and assist poverty-stricken women in third world countries. All the while she is raising the 44th President of the […]

Taking the reins of an institution with deep community roots requires chutzpa, maybe even a little swagger, and in such situations, it is my understanding that the prevailing wisdom is to go big or go home. It does not appear that Live Arts’ new artistic director, Julie Hamberg, is headed home any time soon. Hamberg […]

Barboursville’s eminent regional theater, Four County Players, is celebrating four solid decades of musicals, contemporaries, classics, 10-minute festivals, and all the various and delightful manifestations of staged drama with a one-weekend-only celebratory blowout, 40 and Fabulous. They’re bringing in some local heavy hitters to re-live the thrills in a musical revue: Jane Scatena, Joncey Boggs, […]

Eugène Ionesco lived in France as World War II broke out. In the heart of Europe, he was able to observe firsthand the virtually unchecked spread of Fascism and Nazism among a seemingly reasonable population, and this sudden transformation had a deep effect on him. A generation of European artists saw the same, and from […]