Rehearsals began today, and the full cast announced for the World Premiere of WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! which begins previews at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on August 8 and will run until August 19th on the Nikos Stage.

It’s a new play by Katori Hall, who was a relatively obscure new playwright until recently, and she is making waves in the theatre world. Hall’s The Mountaintop, an 80-minute period piece about Martin Luther King’s final night before his assassination, came and went on Broadway. Our colleague, Charles Giuliano was probably the only Berkshire critic to see it in New York, and he wrote an intense, probing review. (Link)

When she spoke with the U.K.’s Guardian, Hall noted that “There have been a ton of plays that are showing more variety from black playwrights. My own influences are all over the place” Like? “Everyone expects me to say August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller. But I don’t read many plays. I prefer to get my inspiration from visual art, from people like Henri Cartier-Bresson, and from writers like Tom Wolfe – and he’s an old white Republican! “

Hall is a journalist turned actor-cum-writer from Memphis, Tennessee and does not traffic in the tried and true theatrical themes. Get a load of the premise for WHADDABLOODCLOT!!!.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

On May 17, 2004, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts became the first US state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Since that time, same-sex marriage has become perhaps the most contentious social policy issue of the 21st century. Nowhere has the debate been waged more heatedly and on such a scale than in California, where a 2008 ballot initiative called Proposition 8 resulted in an amendment to the state constitution that declared “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $40 million and $43 million, respectively – from over 64,000 people in all 50 states and more than 20 foreign countries – surpassing every campaign in the country in spending except the presidential contest. Since 2008, there have been federal legal challenges that resulted in Proposition 8 being overturned on the grounds that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, but, due to the long appeals process, same-sex marriages have yet to be performed in the state.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale in a scene from Far From Heaven (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The sweep of the new musical Far From Heaven is daunting, since it is as much a sociological statement with music and acting as it is a fully formed evening’s entertainment. As such, it picks at the scars left over from the post WWII Eisenhower era, offering tempting insights into what life was really like in the time celebrated by the television series Mad Men. On the surface it was “Morning in America”, as the promise of America was being realized for many, but it was also a terrible time if you chose to think for yourself and not conform.

The musical reopens wounds for those gay men who actually came of age around 1957, and the women some may have married. Like me, they may find Far From Heaven a painful musical to watch, because it recaptures those times so accurately. Oddly enough, the musical’s depictions of 1950′s life are realistic and honest, capturing the artifice perfectly. It was a time when personal authenticity was at its lowest. People behaved as others expected them to, and did not live for themselves, but for some imagined ideal.

Far From Heaven could bring back the excruciating memories for some, while others might wish for a return to the days when homosexuality – the fulcrum upon which the whole story rests – was called “The love that dare not speak its name.”

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.

(l to r) Bradley Cooper, Alessandro Nivola and Patricial Clarkson in The Elephant Man at the Williamstown Theatre Festival to August 5, 2012 (photo: T Charles Erickson)

by Larry Murray

The Elephant Man is the best play of the summer (so far) and it’s a shame, really, that more people won’t get to see it since it has but a short run in a small theatre, and tickets have been pretty much sold out for weeks. (There is a lottery 2.5 hours before each performance for a few tickets and standing room.) Written by Bernard Pomerance and having won three Tony Awards including Best Play in its original Broadway incarnation in 1979, it played for two years and has been made into a film, television special and had several noteworthy revivals on Broadway and in London since.

As directed by Scott Ellis, The Elephant Man is the kind of play that turns first time theatre-goers into subscribers. In fact, it is the subscribers to the WTF who snapped up most of tickets months before the box office opened in June.

Of course the actors in this production are a draw in and of themselves. Bradley Cooper goes against type to portray The Elephant Man, one of most disfigured people in history. He lived from 1862 to 1890, the last four years in a hospital under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves. Most of what we know about him is based, like the play, on the memoirs of Treves which calls him by the name of John Merrick while he signed his letters Joseph. Just what disease Merrick suffered from is still the subject of conjecture today, recent DNA tests on his hair, bones and relatives being inconclusive.

Click to read the rest at Berkshire on Stage.