Life as Chekhov depicted it may have been no bowl of cherries on the Prozorov estate, but it apparently beats the hell out of present-day Moscow. Janusz Glowacki’s updated fable shows its debt to “Three Sisters” primarily through frequent campy litanies of desperation. Its three sisters transfer their longing from the cesspool of corruption that the Russian capital has become to the shining center of a new world order: Brighton Beach. But even Neil Simon’s old stomping grounds have been poisoned by mobbed-up capital. The eponymous Stiopa (Kim McKean), the orphaned stepsister who’d be Cinderella if Cinderella were really a guy, crosses the ocean only to end up clawing his/her way out of imprisonment in a brothel. Did I mention that this is a comedy? Glowacki’s frenetic script never cuts its pitch-black wit with sentimentality, and Trap Door Theatre’s ferocious production attacks the tangled plot with brio. Even though Nicole Wiesner’s Tania occasionally takes her cartoonish role over the top into stridency, and the second-act business involving an accordion player remains pretty impenetrable, the cast’s savage energy and intelligence nevertheless make of Glowacki’s bitingly funny play another feather in Trap Door’s vagabond cap. (John Beer)
An Odd Dream: A Review of “The Pragmatists” at Trap Door Theatre Trap Door opens its thirtieth season with an early play by one of the twentieth century’s kings of strange—Polish surrealist writer, artist, photographer and drug-adventurer Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz.
The Wreckage of a Body: A Review of “Medea Material” at Trap Door Theater Director Max Truax's production of Heiner Muller's "Medea Material" takes the text, as translated and adapted by Sarah Tolan-Mee, and uses it as the basis for the ensemble's explorations into images and language of colonization, war and violence.
