I love Yasmina Reza's 'Art.' My infatuation with the playwright's script started four years ago when the piece was produced by the Curtainbox Theatre Company, and it brought me great delight to hear that the QC Theatre Workshop and director Tyson Danner planned to stage the play with the same cast that performed the material for the Curtainbox.
Directed by David Bonde, the Curtainbox Theatre Company's Hedda Gabler starts off on a happy, frivolous tone. As George Tesman (Reader employee Mike Schulz) tells his Aunt Julie (Corinne Johnson) about the honeymoon from which he's just returned, they share smiles and hopeful, knowing glances. Yet several minutes into this, during Tuesday night's performance, I was a bit bored, wondering why the Curtainbox - which had consistently produced weighty, thoughtful material - was suddenly producing a script filled with such lighthearted but fundamentally pointless drivel.
It's doubtful anyone needs to be told that launching a new theatre company - particularly in an area already rife with theatre companies - can be a risky venture, which is likely why Quad Cities-based organizations have tended to debut with relatively low-risk offerings. In 2008, the Harrison Hilltop Theatre chose to stage, as its first production, David Auburn's intimate, four-character drama Proof; a week later, the Curtainbox Theatre Company arrived on the scene with Three Viewings, a trio of Jeffrey Hatcher monologues.
It is with great apprehension that I write this review of the Curtainbox Theatre Company's production of 
Playwright John Patrick Shanley's Danny & the Deep Blue Sea is an alternately romantic and volatile two-character drama that finds Roberta, a 31-year-old, jobless mother of a troubled teen, forging a fragile bond with Danny, a 29-year-old truck driver nicknamed "The Beast." And while watching the Curtainbox Theatre Company's current presentation of this 1984 offering, it probably won't take you long to realize that co-stars Kimberly Furness and Eddie Staver III aren't really acting in the production; they're dancing.
Just because Three Viewings - the area debut by the Curtainbox Theater Company, previously based in Los Angeles - is being staged at St. Ambrose University, and features St. Ambrose theatre professor Corinne Johnson among its cast, don't assume that this trio of Jeffrey Hatcher monologues will be any sort of academic exercise.Subscribe & Listen to Reader Podcasts
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