items tagged with Joshua Kahn

I could’ve left Saturday’s Playcrafters Barn Theatre production of Ghost of a Chance at intermission and been quite pleased with the evening’s entertainment. Unfortunately, I exited after the night's second act frustrated almost to the point of anger – not at director Patti Flaherty or her cast, but at the show's playwrights Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus.

As Oregon-based playwright Michael Wehrli is the author of Titanic Aftermath – the historical drama being staged at Moline’s Playcrafters Barn Theatre May 11 through 20 – I initially presume that he’s seen James Cameron’s Oscar-winning movie. In our April 25 phone interview, he tells me he has, and that it was even the inspiration for his play.

That’s not exactly the compliment it might seem, though, considering he calls Cameron’s Titanic “visually stunning and incredibly, maddeningly frustrating because of the fictional characters.

“I mean, they took up half the story,” says Wehrli of the young lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, “and it was the actual survivors’ stories, to me, that were ... interesting. That, and the corporate-negligence side to the tragedy, which is hardly ever addressed in dramatic form.

“So I thought, ‘All right, well, I’m just going to write a play about all this.’” Wehrli laughs. “‘How the hell do I do that?’”

The Playcrafters Barn Theatre’s production of Rehearsal for Murder suffers from poor pacing, but excels in its sincere sentiment and charm. The actors, for the most part, tend to take too many beats between lines, which leads to sometimes-clunky dialogue progression. Still, Friday night’s performance was appealing for its overall emotional effect, and likable for the cast’s ability to move the audience to sympathetic sorrow for the main character’s heartache.

A day after seeing it, I still can’t decide whether I like playwright Jim Leonard Jr.’s And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, but I do know that I appreciate director Patti Flaherty’s efforts in staging this nonlinear tale for New Ground Theatre. During Friday’s performance, I struggled to follow the action, as Leonard’s script confusingly jumps back and forth in time. Thankfully, however, Flaherty’s directorial work helps create some clarity to the “when” with which we’re dealing.

Sure, it's the Greek tragedy to end all Greek tragedies. But is any stage tragedy, Greek or otherwise, as unashamedly, wickedly enjoyable as that of the fall of Oedipus?