A three-ring circus excites us with more than we can possibly take in with only two eyes.     A three-act play relies on incitement, complication and resolution.     Compass Rose Theater’s New Play Festival promises three days of ambition, achievement and aspiration. Day I: Ambition     Imagine success at playwriting as a mountain to be climbed. Friday evening you see one playwright beginning the climb, another working his way up. You...

In stereotype, the Victorian era is dark and overbearing, peopled with prudish and stodgy citizens. That stereotype gives the required context for Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room or The Vibrator Play. The assumption is that the doctor — providing relief for hysteria by using a vibrator on his patients, female and male — is both innovative for Victorian sensibilities and naïve of mental and physical health concerns as we understand them today.     Directed by...

Sometimes you want a simple beach novel to bide away the time, and sometimes you want to be in the presence of a master who can control language, inflection and develop great profound meanings. If you are in the latter mood, Bay Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Price is the show to see.  In The Price, Miller revisits the family dynamics he explored in Death of a Salesman. This work has some prescient lines for today, some of the most realistic (and often, painful) family dialogues...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.     So says Jane Austen in the original chic lit, Pride and Prejudice, which opens The Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s third season at the Bowie Playhouse. Questing to bring local audiences not only works by the Bard but also other time-tested classics, the company takes us to Britain’s Regency. Jon Jory’s 2005 stage adaptation promises “...