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British playwright Alan Bennett has a gift for creating intriguing characters. Most widely known on this side of the pond is his fascinating (and sympathetic) portrait of England’s George III, the monarch American history so roundly demonizes, in a play filmed in 1994 as The Madness of King George. In Bennett’s Talking Heads (1988), monologues from unassuming Englishmen and women unfold with startling poignancy. Simple characters yield complex, moving studies of the human condition.... Read more

Memorable characters are the heart of great storytelling. Since cavemen and women first started spinning tall tales around the campfire, the essence of fiction has remained constant: Create imaginary people who reflect our desires, needs, hopes or fears. The best stories — whether in a book, on screen or on the stage — have characters that draw us into their world.... Read more

Imagination brings a blank page or an empty stage to life. A composer’s song can take a theatergoer anywhere his mind and heart allow him to travel.... Read more

Writing under a pseudonym, an author wields words more freely than he might under his own name. Pamphleteers during the American Revolution challenged British rule with gallows-risking rhetoric. Bloggers today opine, gossip and break news in ways that might jeopardize their day jobs. But with outrageousness all the rage on the modern American stage, why would a contemporary playwright adopt a pen name?... Read more

Just before sunset on a recent Friday evening, a cow mooed outside the Unadilla Theatre barn in Marshfield. Then some sheep brayed, and a cloud of gnats appeared above a fence lined with white-petaled wildflowers. The creatures unconsciously lent ambience to the play being performed that night: a tragicomedy set in rural, late-19th-century Russia, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.... Read more

To appreciate English playwright Joe Orton, a dark sense of humor helps. In the half-dozen or so plays that make up his life’s work, Orton wields a rapier wit — acerbic, often profane and always dripping with sarcasm. He gleefully despoils the graven images of British society, such as church, state and family. And he mines taboos — incest, rape and pederasty — for laughs.... Read more

Gumption. If one word can sum up the theme of Gone with the Wind and the spirit of its feisty heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, it would be this saucy Southern synonym for tenacity and spunk. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell identified her novel’s central question: “What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under?”... Read more

Oscar Wilde’s wit is like icicles in the midday winter sun: glittering, dripping and slightly dangerous. The Irish playwright’s bons mots and barbs sparkle as sharply today as they did during his creative apogee in the early 1890s, when his plays were the toast of the London stage. Failure to smile while watching or reading Wilde may indicate a Botox overdose.... Read more

Conventional wisdom suggests that when a person loses the ability to use one sense, the other senses compensate by becoming sharper. Not so in The Nose, writer-director Aaron Masi’s original stage adaption of 19th-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same title. When a gentleman’s nose goes missing in this satirical tale, total nonsense ensues.... Read more

People have long debated the question of what it means to be human. What defining characteristic distinguishes us from the animals? The scientist might point to the power of speech. The philosopher might propose the capacity to reason. The playwright, however, focuses on how people interact — their ability, or inability, to connect with others. How they love, how they hate; how affection, longing, resentment and shades of joy and sorrow develop between flawed individuals on their journeys.... Read more