Justin Boyd
Justin Boyd is a playwright, screenwriter and co-editor of the Theater section of the Rail.
You know Michelle “Shells” Haylie Hoffman. Or you know her type—fancy drinks, break-the-bank shoes and brand names flying from her lips like signal flares to any moneyed, available men in the vicinity—“I know what’s hot, so I am hot!”
Since 1996, Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival has evolved from a budgeted production of a single, featured play (accompanied by a swarm of smaller, unbudgeted productions performing in off-times) to its current format of three fully-budgeted productions of new plays.
The story of how George Packer’s play Betrayed was produced would be a dream if it weren’t borne of a reality that’s so maddening and so tragic.
The story of how George Packer’s play Betrayed was produced would be a dream if it weren’t borne of a reality that’s so maddening and so tragic.
Colin Denby Swanson’s Atomic Farmgirl paints Fairfield, Washington as the epitome of one vision of the American West. It’s farm country, a land of clear, blue sky and limitless fields filled with wheat, barley, cows and horses; a peaceful place where humans, animals and crops live closely and depend on each other in a way that seems old-fashioned, lost in time.
Jason Grote’s 1001 is a story about stories—stories as identity, stories as culture, stories as survival, stories as everything: fantasy and reality, hope and despair, creation and annihilation (and so much more).
By Justin Boyd
What does it do to a play when you move it from the place and time for (and from) which it was conceived?
“Geek is good.” That’s not the motto of the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company, but it could be. The Williamsburg-based troupe builds its productions—and its audience—by tapping an appetite for spectacle-laden shows that sport everything from undead Shakespeare characters to—no surprise—blood-sucking gunslingers.
When I first saw Qui Nguyen’s Trial by Water: A Gook Story Part One – in a college workshop production at Ohio University in 2001 – what struck me most was how young the two brothers at the center of the play were.
Quincy Long’s new "comedy with songs" opens on members of a middle-America school board singing the pledge of allegiance, a gesture filled with the lofty political and philosophical scope of words like "Republic," "Liberty," and "Justice."