Limited Perspective

People love Choir Boy , written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and now playing at ACT , in a co-production with the Fifth. People also think something is missing; the plot is thin and some of the characters are not sketched out. I think both people are right.  It’s okay that not all the paint-by-number spaces are filled in.  I saw a wonderful clip of an interview with Jimmy Stewart recently. You can find it in a Twitter feed here . He said, “Creating moments in movies – this I think is the important thing.” He was speaking of the film It’s a Wonderful Life. The moment he refers to is when his character, George Bailey is at a low point, sitting on a bar stool and prays for guidance. Stewart says, starting after about 50 second in,  “That scene, I remember when I first read the first draft of the script, and that scene, the little prayer affected me … when I read it, of course. When I did it in the movie it did. And it did the same to me right now.”  That moment hits him every time, as it did

In Cloud Tectonics , now playing at 12th Avenue Arts, produced by Sound Theatre Company and Earthseed, Celestina del Sol has come unstuck in time, to coin a phrase. Nevertheless, she and Anibal de la Luna fall for each other. You can tell by the names that though their paths cross, they will diverge again. It’s a love story, doomed (or is it?) by Celestina living outside of time, on a different scale than Anibal. But it is a love story – driven not by astronomy but by chemistry between the actors and poetry in the script. I can’t remember the last time I saw intimacy played so well on stage. It’s very much worth seeing this show.

You don’t have to tell stories, but it’s necessary sometimes. Adele Mirabel, a character in the play In the Time of the Butterflies , steps into this necessity to tell the story of herself and her three sisters in the middle of the last century in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorial rule of President Rafael Trujillo. The play, by Caridad Svich is based on a novel of the same name by Julia Alvarez. Alvarez wanted to write “beyond polemics.” The play does the same, zeroing in on the personal impact of the regime – especially Trujillo himself, directly – on the Mirabel family.   The sisters become known as the mariposas, butterflies, and in varying degrees, decide to take action, and begin to join the revolution. Their world is broken, lives are taken, yet even in prison, they sing with each other muévete, mi niña, muévete – move, my girl, move. It’s no spoiler to say not all of the sisters make it through, despite their strength and vision. The play tells you where things