John Crutchfield is a poet, playwright and performer based in Asheville. His plays Ivory, The Songs of Robert, Everything and God, and Twelve Treatises on Memory have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works. An avid collaborator, he has created and performed interdisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, G. Alex and the Movement, Legacy Butoh, and Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre. He has been Artist-In-Residence at the North Carolina Governor’s School, the Djerassi Artists Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Association d’Art de La Napoule (France), and the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany). He teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and works as a literary translator. More info at: www.johncrutchfield.com
Steven Samuels has served as manager of, and occasional actor with, New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company; senior editor of TCG Books and American Theatre magazine; artistic associate at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; instructor of theater history at New York University; and a judge on the Village Voice Obie committee. The recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts playwrighting fellowship, he edited Charles Ludlam's Complete Plays and Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, and David Kaufman's award-winning biography of Ludlam, Ridiculous! He has taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College and in the Great Smokies Writing Program, and directed a new production of John Crutchfield's The Songs of Robert for performances in Asheville, Boone, and the New York International Fringe Festival. He is also the newly named artistic director of The Magnetic Field, a café, bar, and performance house scheduled to open in the River Arts District's Glen Rock Depot sometime 2010.
For its one hour, ten minute length, Get Your Mind Out of the Butter may well represent the best live sketch comedy available in this town.
Everyone leaves the theatre feeling like they learned something, or at least re-learned something, about the preciousness of life and friendship.
Let’s face it, in this day and age of hipster sensibility, the tortured optimism and simplicity of Denver’s lyrics and his persona are the very anti-thesis of cool.
If frivolity is what you’re after, Flat Rock Playhouse’s production delivers.
Parkway Playhouse world premieres the original, full-scale musical, based on the sad tale of Tom Dula.
“Dale Earnhardt is dead,” the play begins, and that’s about as deep as the NASCAR references get. Tradin’ Paint was written by Catherine Bush, the playwright-in-residence at The Barter Theatre, where a reading of Tradin’ Paint won the 2006 Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights.
The Montford Park Players perform Shakespeare’s “problem play” at the Hazel Robinson Amphitheatre. The show runs Friday-Sunday, 7:30 p.m. through Aug. 22.
“Funny is money,” Mel Brooks has always liked to say, and with the musical The Producers, he proved it.
HART’s production has all that musical theatre requires for a good time: sassy sexiness, big dance numbers and a plot that engages and remains relevant 35 years after its debut.
Mitch and Morrie are embodied by superlative actors unerringly committed to their roles, in this exceptional production at SART.
Flat Rock has assembled a cast of local luminaries who deliver performances worthy of their better-known predecessors, and the unique setting adds significant power and pleasure to the proceedings.
The action of the play takes place during what is to be Esther Greenwood’s final ten seconds of life, stretched out by magnificent hallucinations recapping her life and demise.
The play is smart, and this production is good fun. But you see the challenge: how does one play a character well who is himself playing a character but doing it badly? Or what’s the difference between terrible acting and acting terrible?
Death, loss, mother-in-laws and the Bible. All that, and RUTH manages to be a surprisingly light, beautiful and moving play.
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