Shannon O'Brien, Karina Monrreal, and Hannah Murray in The Dinner PartyWhen attending a student production, I'm excited for the young performers, and hope the evening ends with the audience standing and cheering. Such were my hopes on the opening night of Neil Simon's The Dinner Party for the Scott Community College actors , who gave it their best shot with some standout performances. But to have a great production, it helps to have great writing and a great story to tell.

William Marbury in Crossing Acheron: The Tragedy of AntigoneIt's unfortunate that William Marbury's angry, domineering King Creon and Analisa Percuoco's defiant, strong-willed Antigone don't share more stage time in Scott Community College's production of Crossing Acheron: The Tragedy of Antigone. The actors share a similar energy in their performances, creating a palpable tension as the king condemns Antigone to be buried alive for, against his decree, twice attempting to bury her slain brother. Marbury and Percuoco are equally gifted at gleaning emotional meaning out of director/author Laura Winton's Greek-tragedy adaptation and delivering their words with conviction, and their performances and chemistry are so captivating that they left me hoping the two will appear in a future production that involves more interaction between them.

John R. Turner and Isaac Scott in Blue Sky MerchantsScott Community College's Blue Sky Merchants is an interesting idea that doesn't reach its potential, mainly due to its absence of subtlety. Local playwright and actor John R. Turner's play about a man (simply named Deskman, and played by Turner) who listens to, and then green-lights or rejects, ideas for television shows could be a poignant commentary on modern society's tastes in entertainment. Yet while Turner has a laudable knack for dialogue, Thursday's production left me with too-little question as to his intended message, mainly because his Deskman character clearly states the author's intent, rather than allowing the audience to decipher it.

Essentials Tyson Danner (left) and James Bleecker (standing), with Jackie Madunic and Jason Platt, in Angels in America: Perestroika For the third year in a row, I've composed a list of 12 area-theatre participants who devoted their time, energy, and skills to numerous theatrical organizations and venues during the past year. And once again - happily and inspiringly - it hasn't been necessary to repeat names from one year to the next; local theatre, to the great good fortune of local audiences, never seems to run out of talent.

Tom Walljasper, Sandra D Rivera, Tristan Layne Tapscott, and Erin Dickerson in Are We There Yet Five Extraordinary Ensembles

An actor friend of mine says he always wants to be the worst performer in everything he's in, because if the rest of the cast is doing stronger work than he is, that means the show is in really, really good shape. With that in mind, any actor worth his or her salt would be thrilled to be the worst performer among these five ensembles.

 

Patrick Joslyn and Caitlin Herrera in The Lottery The short stories of author Shirley Jackson frequently kick you in the gut. The current presentations of Jackson's The Summer People and The Lottery at Scott Community College frequently tickle your ribs.

the Promises, Promises ensemble During a recent post-show conversation, an actor friend and I agreed that perhaps the most exciting moments at any theatrical production are those few seconds before the production even starts, when the lights dim, cell phones (please God) are turned to silent or vibrate, and the venue becomes alive with possibility - with the awareness that, in this live art form, absolutely anything can happen.

Jessica Stratton and Daniel Schaub in Almost, Maine For romantic comedies that display a proudly eccentric or whimsical bent, it's a fine line between aw-w-w-w and u-u-u-ugh. And playwright John Cariani's Almost, Maine - a series of comically romantic vignettes that involves 19 Northeasterners in a frigid American province - seems almost designed to encourage irritated sighs and eye-rolling amongst its more jaded attendees. It's the sort of literal-minded fantasy in which one character carries the remnants of her broken heart in her purse, and another returns to her boyfriend's apartment with armfuls of "all the love you ever gave me," and angrily dumps them on the floor.

Randy Langtimm, Bri Kenney, and J.W. Hertner in Design for Living Design for Living, which Scott Community College is currently presenting at the Village Theatre, is a quick-witted Noël Coward comedy concerning an interior decorator (Bri Kenney's Gilda) who finds her romantic affections torn between a struggling artist (Randy Langtimm's Otto), and a struggling playwright (J.W. Hertner's Leo). It is also, by a considerable margin, the most engaging of the three Scott productions I've seen since November, and while I'm not usually the type to bestow awards, I want to begin by praising three facets of Saturday's presentation that might easily stand as theatrical "bests" of 2008.

the Inside Out ensembleMy Verona Productions' last stage presentation premiered almost a year ago, so you could argue that the company is simply making up for lost time with its production of Christian Krauspe's Inside Out, a play within a play within a play (within another play, if I interpreted the climactic scene correctly). Yet based on its April 10 preview performance, the author's work-in-progress is still less a play than a stoner's conceit - "What if, like, everything we say and do is being written by, like, some unseen higher power who's, like, determining our actions without, like, our knowing it?" - and holds together about as well as most stoned ramblings; a few hours and a few bags of chips later, your "insights" begin to look rather dim.

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