Ian Wehrle

Shelter Inn Place

September 23, 2026

The major problem with director Joan Kane’s production is that the play is too slow and sluggish, needing to be faster and more breakneck. As a result, the jokes don’t land as the audience has too much time to think about them and we never believe that the characters are worried about the impending storm. Also the acting is so exaggerated that the actors seem over the top rather than overwrought and stressed out. She has also allowed each actor to be one dimensional making the play rather hollow and artificial: Frank is harried, George is melancholy, Sam is randy, Mildred is flamboyant and Heidi is depressed. As to the plotting, each piece of stage business goes on too long; more events are needed. This is basically a farce but not staged at farce tempo or having enough mishaps to keep it going. Although we hear enough about the approaching storm from the periodic radio reports, the characters do not get upset enough about it. No one seems ready to take cover. It takes the whole first act for Frank to finish boarding up the windows. [more]

Death of a Driver

March 5, 2019

The play is carefully plotted, and the tragic action that Snider builds runs its course in a logical, plausible fashion. But something about "Death of a Driver" never quite catches fire. The story has gravity but lacks the sense of pity and terror that tragedy is famously supposed to invoke. Maybe it’s partly due to the fact that the play is so brief, and that its short scenes sometimes take place years apart, creating a kind of herky-jerky quality. Maybe it’s because the world of the play is relatively narrow—with the lack of supporting characters preventing us from getting a full sense of the Kenyan culture and political landscape. [more]

Sycorax, Cyber Queen of Qamara

November 5, 2018

Delightfully growling in a quasi-Middle Eastern accent, her head encased in a babushka, plastered with makeup, wearing a flowing robe and hobbling on a cane, Sandra Bargman is terrific as the title character and anchor of "Sycorax, Cyber Queen of Qamara." It’s playwright Fengar Gael’s cheeky fantasia that tells of this unseen witch from William Shakespeare’s "The Tempest." [more]

A Room of My Own

March 8, 2016

The most colorful character in more ways that one is Uncle Jackie (Cantone) who lives upstairs. A closeted gay man in a society that doesn’t accept him, he has become an angry, self-loathing misanthrope with a barbed tongue to match. Cantone gives a bigger-than-life performance that makes Jackie a truly memorable character. In the play’s quieter moments we find out what he has sacrificed all his adult life in order to remain in the old neighborhood and it is he who is keeping the family going with handouts that continually avert disaster. [more]

Film Chinois

January 23, 2015

While "Film Chinois" certainly has an interesting premise to create a stage film noir set in turbulent postwar China, the play fails to deliver on its promise to entertain as well as thrill with a coherent story. Though the play has all the elements of the genre, here they are confusing rather than organic to the material. The elegantly staged production never remembers to turn up the heat. [more]