Articles tagged with: Joseph Wiens
‘Five Mile Lake’ at Shattered Globe: Siblings, distant or demanding, all in the swim together
Review: Rachel Bond’s play “Five Mile Lake,” a provocative slice of life currently held up for examination by Shattered Globe Theatre, is about lives out of kilter, out of perspective, out of adjustment. Before the play even begins, Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s disorienting set tells you as much. ★★★
‘True West’ at Shattered Globe: Rival brothers, far apart in one place, at each other’s throats
Review: Austin and Lee are Jungian poster boys, brothers who seem to hold nothing in common, the one a buttoned-up intellectual writer and the other a beer-gulping ruffian and petty thief. But deep down, each pines for the life the other leads. They are the conjoined, complex antiheroes of Sam Shepard’s iconic 1980 play “True West,” and they are madly, marvelously superimposed in a startling production by Shattered Globe Theatre. ★★★★
When leviathan turns fury on ‘Whaleship Essex,’ it’s a rough voyage to salvation in tiny boats
Review: Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Shattered Globe Theatre’s ambitious staging of “The Whaleship Essex,” ensemble member Joe Forbrich’s retelling of an early 19th-century whaling catastrophe, is the sheer scope and rigor of the enterprise. It is a tale of man’s hubris meets nature’s fury on the high seas. And to put it mildly, the greedy, ravaging interlopers get sprayed. ★★★
Role Playing: Joseph Wiens starts at full throttle to convey alienation of ‘Look Back in Anger’
Interview: The first thing Joseph Wiens had to overcome in achieving his electric performance in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” at Redtwist Theatre was the sheer volume of lines. Well, that and what he calls the “mishmash” of British accents. And of course the machine-gun speed at which Osborne’s teeming language had to be delivered – intelligibly.
‘Look Back in Anger’ at Redtwist: Bitterness nurtured as mode of life in post-war England
Review : Jimmy Porter is a bright but very angry young working-class Englishman who has grown to adulthood in the decade following the end of World War II. While he has married somewhat above his social grade, his life is going nowhere. In John Osborne’s searing 1956 play “Look Back in Anger,” Jimmy consecrates his sharp wit and tireless energy to a seething, circular rant. Jonathan Berry directs an electric production at Redtwist Theatre, where Joseph Wiens lends volcanic Jimmy all the brilliance and sadness of a man in existential warp, spiritually homeless in a world that has lost its meaning. ★★★★
To corporate raider, the blood is just business in ‘Other People’s Money’ at Shattered Globe
Review: Larry Garfinkle lives by the numbers, as in quarterly profits and losses. He’s a practical guy, all business, with a nose for blood. When he sees a company in trouble, he moves in, goes for the kill, let the working stiffs fall where they may. And Larry Garfinkle is thoroughly inhabited, from his three-piece suits to his vulgar charm, in Ben Werling’s portrayal at the center of Jerry Sterner’s wry comedy “Other People’s Money” for Shattered Globe Theatre. ★★★★
