Neal Weaver

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Closer

Neal Weaver
Patrick Marber's play takes a hip, darkly funny view of the transitory nature of love in London in the 1990s. Obituary writer and would-be novelist Daniel (Ko Zushi) rushes to assist a mysterious, flirtatious, accident-prone young woman named Alice (Meagann Pallares) who's been knocked down by a London taxi. It......
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Candida

Neal Weaver
George Bernard Shaw wrote the engaging comedy Candida at least partially as a response to Ibsen's A Doll House, about an intelligent woman's attempt to break out of her husband's determined treatment of her as a "child wife." Here, Shaw sketches a woman, Candida (Molly Leland), who infantilizes her clergyman......
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The Lonesome West

Neal Weaver
Martin McDonagh's comedy is set in a village in western Ireland, which seems to be a hot-bed of murder, suicide and rampaging Irish eccentricity. It centers on two brothers, Valene (Jonathan Bray) and Coleman (Jason Paul Field), who are locked in implacable hostility. Coleman has shot their father in what......
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Hamlet

Neal Weaver
Over the 10 years of its existence, the Independent Shakespeare Company has developed a reliable house style: brisk, athletic, no-nonsense productions, with a contemporary sensibility, a Brechtian objectivity and a talent for unlocking the plays' comic potential. All of these virtues are present in this, its fifth rendering of Hamlet,......
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Did You Do Your Homework?

Neal Weaver
In his solo play, Aaron Braxton marshals his skills as writer, actor, singer and director to relate his experience as a substitute teacher in urban schools. Economically Braxton, who is black, is not that different from his students, but his teacher mother taught him solid middle-class virtues, which prove to......
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Cinderella Christmas

Neal Weaver
There's lots of magic to delight the kids — who are invited to boo the ugly stepsisters — and a live miniature horse to pull Cinderella's pumpkin coach. There are jokes, some raunchy, to amuse the grown-ups — about the Kardashians and their ilk. The sex-crazed stepsisters, played in grotesque......
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A Christmas Westside Story

Neal Weaver
Following their long, goofy tradition of musical mash-ups, director Matt Walker and the Troubadour Theatre Company combine the songs from West Side Story with the plot of A Christmas Story, the movie based on Jean Shepherd's comic memoirs. The result, A Christmas Westside Story, has all the familiar elements of......
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Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie

Neal Weaver
While researching the life of Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered and isolated radium, playwright Alan Alda went to France, hoping to inspect Curie's letters — but after more than a century, they're still radioactive. In the early days of their research, Curie (the strong Anna Gunn) and......
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Jerker, or the Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of them Dirty

Neal Weaver
When Robert Chesley's ground-breaking play was first produced in 1986 at Celebration Theatre, it was roundly condemned in certain quarters. But despite the sensationalistic publicity, it was a serious and deeply moving play about the worst days of the AIDS crisis, when the only safe sex seemed to be phone......
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Waiting for Lefty

Neal Weaver
Of all the agit-prop plays of the 1930s, only this Clifford Odets work was potent enough to capture mainstream attention, launch Odets' career, validate the efforts of the fledgling Group Theatre and achieve semiclassic status. Dealing as it does with a taxi strike, it put the lives and pungent language......