Theatre

2015 Playwrights Festival

Village Theatre

Friday, March 6, through Sunday, March 15

Artistic Director Chris Jansen is doing something a bit different with the presentations in New Ground Theatre's annual Playwrights Festival, running at the Village Theatre March 6 through 15. On two of those days, there'll be a reading of a new, full-length play titled This Side Up, written by University of Iowa undergraduate Christopher "Kit" Grassi. On four of those days, there'll be staged productions of five plays by five separate authors, each lasting between 10 and 15 minutes.

And in one of those plays, Sam Collier's In My Mother's Tongue Like Winter, actor Michael Carron will play a poetry-minded grolar bear.

Neil Patrick Harris, at the tail end of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, climaxed his hosting duties with the resolution to a magic trick he'd set up earlier in the evening. Much, much earlier in the evening.

STILL ALICE

In Still Alice, newly minted Oscar winner Julianne Moore plays Alice Howland, a 50-year-old recently diagnosed with a hereditary form of Alzheimer's. At one point in the movie, after a series of not-bad days and pretty-awful ones, Alice and her family attend an off-Broadway production of The Three Sisters starring the youngest Howland daughter, Lydia (Kristen Stewart). We see Lydia enact Chekhov's dialogue with appropriate, impressive anxiety and fortitude, and our view of Alice in the audience suggests that she sees it, too. After the play ends, the family goes backstage to congratulate Lydia, and Alice, with carefully chosen words, praises her daughter for her complex rendering of Chekhovian heart and humanity. Lydia smiles and blushes; this might be the most interest her mother has ever shown in her acting career. Then Alice asks what play Lydia is doing next, and whether she'll be sticking around New York much longer. And in the reaction shot that follows, the heartbreak in Lydia's eyes verifies what we immediately suspect: Alice, at this moment, has no idea who Lydia is.

Dance

Love Stories featuring Romeo & Juliet

Scottish Rite Cathedral

Friday, February 27, and Saturday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.

Ballet Quad Cities' latest presentation in the company's annual Love Stories series - being staged February 27 and 28 at Moline's Scottish Rite Cathedral - is officially titled Love Stories featuring Romeo & Juliet. As love stories go, that's an awfully powerful one. It's also a pretty depressing one, considering that Romeo and Juliet, in the end, both die.

Of course, you know that. And Ballet Quad Cities' Courtney Lyon knows you know that. And that's why choreographer and BQC Artistic Director Lyon chose to do something unusual in her particular take on Shakespeare's tale of star-crossed lovers: "I put the end of the ballet first."