“The Brothers Size” / The Ancram Opera House

IT’S A PLAY not a musical, but at one point, Oshoosi, the younger of the Size brothers, sings. He sings an old ballad called “Try a Little Tenderness.” (Oshoosi adds his own Baroque embellishments in the mode that black jazz and pop singers have made their own.)

It is a rare moment in “The Brothers Size,” a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney. At that moment, the character is joyous, free and persuasive, though much of his young life has been none of the above.

Oshoosi has recently come home from prison. At the Ancram Opera House, home has crooked wood slats and a crooked thrusting stage adorned with unidentifiable metal objects and two metal guardians of the homestead—who look surprised to be there. The set is a marriage of African folk art and American car repair. Read more…

“Baskerville” / Theater Barn

“WHAT IS IT ABOUT?” If you’ve just finished reading a book or come from the theater, someone is likely to ask you that.

Ostensibly, “Baskerville,” currently playing at the Theater Barn, is about Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson; and the title promises that the play will be some sort of adaptation or takeoff on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel “Hound of the Baskervilles.”

While it is very smart theater economics for a playwright to piggyback on something famous when creating a new work, Ken Ludwig has ended up making “Baskervile” mainly about something else. Riding on the bones of a Sherlock Holmes story is merely a means. Read more…

The Actors’ Ensemble production of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” at the new PS21 black box theater in Chatham includes Fern Sloan (Carrie Watts) and Joey Sorge (Ludie). The remaining performances are Saturday, June 8 at 7 p.m. and Sunday, June 9 at 2 p.m. Photo by Deirdre Malfatto

“The Trip to Bountiful” / PS21

ACTRESS FERN SLOAN of Actors’ Ensemble is on my “go see her in anything” list. This time she is Carrie Watts, an old woman flirting with end-days, trapped and plagued by daughter-in-law abuse. She feels compelled to escape for a last journey to Bountiful, the small, disappearing Texas town of her youth.

Sloan extracts meaning and personhood from all her roles. Beauty is hers too—from large wide-set eyes that live a long, narrow distance from her toes, to two big expressive hands in between. Beauty. And she doesn’t even need it.

The play is satisfyingly, appropriately slow. It is like lava pushing people down the mountain. They scrape against one another and comfort and listen to one another on the way. Read more…