The title character, portrayed with a soft-toned nastiness by Paper Chairs regular Gabriel Luna, is vicious, insatiable, anti-social, and selfish. He steals women from his compatriots, including Jacob Trussell's trusting Johannes, who at first seems as charmed by Baal as every woman seems to be. Baal's allure seems to be in the boldness and beauty of his words - for though this play is full of ugly imagery, of human waste, murder, and decay, the nature of Brecht's writing is also imbued with an elegance and lyricism that is hard to ignore. more ›

The clack of keyboards, sputter and stench of traffic, the press of the madding crowd, the burdens of societal expectation: Modern urban life can seem hellish. In Paper Chairs' production of the late 1920s expressionist tragedy Machinal, the rote mechanisms and sensory overload that oppress playwright Sophie Treadwell's protagonist are embodied in sight, sound, and cog-like motion on stage. The larger of two performance spaces at Salvage Vanguard is set in the round for this production, allowing director Dustin Willis to foreground the mechanized feeling of the play's world. A Young Woman (portrayed by Chase Crossno with a high-strung loveliness reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion) is out of step - late for the office job where her coworkers file, type, and even gossip in lockstep; pursued by her boss, whose very touch causes her to recoil - but an obligation to care for her widowed mother leads her to accept a life that repels and numbs her. An encounter with an alluring stranger from south of the border seems to shake her awake, and her struggle to break free from her one-sided marriage ends in violence. more ›

Theatre folk like their little turns of phrase (possibly because they promote a sense of ritual, ownership and history in a field where, historically, the practitioners owned and recorded little). Examples: "Break a leg", "Don't say the M-word", and, most pertinently, "Beckett is fuckin' hard". For a young company to tackle one of his most pitfall-laden works is downright audacious, ostentatious and, in the case of Palindrome Theatre's production directed with savvy by Kate Eminger, a damned blessing. more ›

Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Black Snow is currently in the midst of a run by Tutto Theatre Company at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, is one of those figures it's hard to criticize on his work's merits, which is unfortunate. It's much safer to insist that the work's author is fully deserving of his exalted status, and that the flaws in the production belong to Tutto and director Dustin Wills. But the fact is that it's hard to imagine a better interpretation of Bulgakov's cranky, cartoony piece about what a bummer working in the theater was for him. more ›