Following last year’s run of her play Dreamtime — a fictional drama based on the 2001 murders of Dartmouth professors Half and Suzanne Zantop by Chelsea teens James Parker and Robert Tulloch — Vermont playwright Maura Campbell returns with another original work inspired by troubled youth.... Read more

Staging original plays is a risky proposition in the best of times, even in Vermont’s rich theatrical soil. Producers of the upcoming Ten-Fest at the Valley Players Theater in Waitsfield hope that a less-is-more approach is just the ticket. The “more” is the number of state-based bards whose work will be featured — 11 in all, some budding, others seasoned.... Read more

For Lost Nation Theater, Samuel Beckett’s signature play, Waiting for Godot, is a bit like an economic downturn: Every 10 years or so it comes back around, inspiring reflection on perseverance and hope.... Read more

It’s not the heat. It’s the intensity.... Read more

When playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy launched the Atlantic Theater Company in the 1980s, they made Vermont the troupe’s summer sanctuary.... Read more

A few years ago, a slim volume at Borders jumped out at me. I don’t know which caught my eye first: the jacket photograph — depicting a man’s sand-dappled shins from the POV of their owner, who’s reposing in a beach hammock — or the title, The Importance of Being Lazy. I’d been giving the subject some thought even before spotting the book. That is, wondering if I’d ever have enough free time to put on my lazy pants. The subtitle extolled what I was lacking: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations.... Read more

In a mild autumn like this one, it’s easy to forget — for a moment, at least — the affronts that other seasons deliver. Spring’s muddy slop and stubborn chill. Winter’s icy grip. Summer’s meager sunshine. In this sense, autumn’s gentle embrace is a comforting fiction — an ephemeral diversion, like a story, to buoy the spirit while we subconsciously brace for the inevitable.... Read more

It’s the nature of myths that they be retold. But when playwright Sarah Ruhl pondered the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice — a young bride who ends up in Hades on the day she’s to wed the bard Orpheus — she decided something was missing: Eurydice. More specifically, the voice of the central female character.... 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

What if a Miss Vermont pageant were held but nobody came? What if somebody entered a cow in the contest instead?... Read more