Mar 17

“What Once We Felt” Feels Undercooked

Photo credit: Jake Scaltreto

Presented by Flat Earth Theatre
By Ann Marie Healy
Directed by Lindsay Eagle

March 14 – 22, 2014
The Davis Square Theatre
255 Elm Street
Somerville, MA
Flat Earth on Facebook

Review by Gillian Daniels

(Somerville) What Once We Felt is science fiction that distills contemporary anxieties into a thinly veiled future.  The bedrock of Ann Marie Healy’s dystopia, which premieres in Boston for the first time, is literary digitization, a bleak economy with a suppressed lower class, deplorable health care conditions, iPhone obsessions, and some unlikely but remarkable advances in artificial insemination. The play will make an excellent artifact of our age group.  Though the mask this society wears to disguise its relation to our own is transparent, so is the world-building and the logic behind a woman-only, caste-system culture.  The mechanics are questionable, but the anti-utopian horror that Flat Earth Theatre creates is sublimely creepy. Continue reading

Mar 16

Crave & Beyond The Light: Emotional Explosion

Daniel J. Raps, Erin Rae Zalaski, Jesse Wood, and Christina Malanga in Beyond the light — at Calderwood Pavilion; photo credit Heart and Dagger Productions

Abigail Matzeder, Michael Underhill, and Terrence Patrick Haddad in CRAVE — at Calderwood Pavilion, Photo Credit: Heart and Dagger Productions

Crave by Sarah Kane and Beyond the Light by Joey C. Pelletier, Heart & Dagger Productions, Boston Center for the Arts Rehearsal Hall A, 3/9/12-3/17/12, http://www.heartanddagger.org/.Partial nudity and mature themes

Reviewed by Becca Kidwell

(Boston, MA) Many have tried to dramatize depression to mixed results. The problem tends to be that depression by it’s very nature is a passive thing-the person doesn’t want to do anything. Heart & Dagger escapes the trap of a dry, clinical look at depression by presenting two one acts that cut to the visceral core of despair and the fight to survive.

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