Ten years ago, almost to the day, I left my Rock Island apartment to make my first acquaintance with Genesius Guild’s annual classical-Greek dramas performed largely in mask, reviewing Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles’ Antigone. This past Saturday, leaving the same apartment, I ventured to Rock Island’s Lincoln Park to review Genesius Guild’s masked-drama presentations of ... Seven Against Thebes and Antigone. So nice to see that so much in my life has changed over the past decade.
To be frank, I didn't find the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's comedy I Take This Man all that funny, at least not consistently. However, playwright Jack Sharkey's plot - about a single woman who brings home an unconscious Boston Marathon runner in order to finally have the romance she's long wanted - is incredibly interesting, particularly considering the gradual pace at which Sharkey's story unfolds, leaving you constantly wondering what will happen next. I may not have laughed as much as Sharkey would have liked, but I was certainly entertained during Thursday's performance.
Quad City Music Guild's Thursday-night preview performance of Peter Pan - which, it should be stressed, was still technically a rehearsal - clocked in at roughly an hour and 55 minutes, making director Beth Marsoun's presentation at least a half-hour shorter than any of the four other Peter Pans I've thus far seen on stage. This proved, at alternating times, to be both a very good thing and a rather unfortunate thing. But let's start with the good.
As with a person, sometimes you can fall immediately, madly, irrationally in love with a play. And I think I fell in love with author Charles Morey's Laughing Stock within its first two minutes, when artistic director Gordon Page (Don Hazen) introduced visiting actor Jack Morris (Alex Klimkewicz) to his venerated theatre in New Hampshire, and the young man took a moment to assess his surroundings before saying, incredulously, "It's a barn."
Chris Walljasper isn't exactly a new face in area theatre, as the actor (and recent co-founder of Davenport's Harrison Hilltop Theatre) appeared in Genesius Guild's and Opera @ Augustana's Patience last year summer, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story this past winter, and, most memorably, Carousel and A Year with Frog & Toad for Rock Island's The Green Room.
