Paul Shearman

There is, in "The Last Audition," something almost defiantly modest—a chamber piece of sorrow that refuses the grandiloquence of tragedy even as it circles one. The play, a solo vehicle of hushed ambitions, written by and starring Paul Shearman, sensitively directed by David St John, unfolds like a fading echo in an empty theater, its emotional register pitched not to catharsis but to the quieter, more unsettling key of recognition. It is, at heart, a drama about diminishment—of memory, of stature, of self—and yet it proceeds with a delicacy that feels, in its way, like a form of grace. [more]