Performing Arts: Page 49

A Child’s Christmas Memory

Eugene actor celebrates 31 years of performing A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Performing Arts

Eugene actor David Stuart Bull has been performing Dylan Thomas’ timeless story A Child’s Christmas in Wales for so long, people have forgotten exactly how long it’s been.  Ib Hamide, owner of Café Soriah where Bull performs the piece, says 27 or 28 years. Bull says it’s been more than 30. “This will be, by my count, the 31st year,” Bull claims.  What’s not debatable is that his annual performance of the piece is a local tradition. Continue reading →

Bedtime Stories

Art, truth and murder collide in LCC’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Theater

On the surface, Irish author Martin McDonagh’s plays are foul, transgressive affairs, full of piss and vinegar and erect middle fingers. In the tradition of his literary forbears Swift, Joyce and Beckett, McDonagh is a relentlessly physical writer given to depicting all manner of human grotesquery — violence, perversion, degradation, deformity and compulsive cussing of the worst kind. Continue reading →

Comedy’s Top Mensch

Molière’s 17th-century French farce gets a 21st-century makeover

Theater

Playwright David Ives (A Flea in Her Ear, Venus in Fur) calls his play The School for Lies a “translaptation” of French playwright Molière’s classic 1666 farce The Misanthrope. Lies is now playing at University Theatre under the direction of Tricia Rodley. Ives has maintained much of the source material’s language. The play is written in rhyming verse, and Ives adds well-timed modern zingers for comic effect.  Continue reading →