I think there are few people who would disagree with the only true thing he said during the entire press conference. No one in this country has ever seen anything like the year we have just endured.
If you like a play that keeps you thinking and talking for hours afterward you may have to go a long way to find a more provocative play than this one.
To hear Thoreau's words spoken by David Adkins is revelatory. Adkins is never preachy, always real and confrontational, never violent even with an axe in his hands. His final speech about a vagrant water-lily is as touching a moment as any I've seen on a stage in many years.
You should just indulge yourself, go to Barrington Stage and live vicariously for one hour and 45 minutes in the atmosphere of a 1605 Seville prison. You won't get that chance every year.
I didn't anticipate enjoying a play in a tunnel. I certainly had no idea what I would be finding in three actors I don't know. Even without the offered brownies I would have been compelled to praise the work done by Emergent Ensemble in Housatonic. I have to wonder how they will follow the success of this very strange, but wonderful, play.
People who go to their local theater to see and enjoy and even learn something will be seeing this play. Their reward will be two-fold: meeting and learning the fascinating history of George Rose and at the same time getting to know Ed Dixon whose own story is equally fascinating.
Director John Pietrowski has come as close as anyone ever has to bringing this play to genuine life. He gives his actors a sheen of idealism that helps to mask their basic unpleasantness.
J. Peter Bergman writes of this performance by Gabriel Rodriguez at The Walking Dog Theatre in Hudson, N.Y.: "This hour of devised theater is unlike anything else you are likely to experience."
Director Julianne Boyd has brought Arthur Miller's version of “An Enemy of the People” to the stage with an abrupt honesty that is absolutely riveting. And it is at a particularly fitting moment in Pittsfield history, given General Electric's decades of contamination of the Housatonic River and Mayor Daniel Bianchi's recent endorsement of a natural gas pipeline that conveys fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania where the drilling has polluted the aquifer and will provide no benefit to the Berkshires.
