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Titus Opens Friday Night

Kyle Hatley’s production of Titus Andronicus opens at The Living Room Friday night (previews start tonight at 8pm).  This remarkable play epic in it’s scope and ambition sees a rare staging here in Kansas City.  It promises to be moving, musical and mad.  Come out and see it now through June 24th.  8pm shows every night but Mondays and Tuesdays.  Robert Trussell of the Kansas City Start writes:

Now Hatley is back at the Living Room, a downtown performance venue where the stage configuration changes with every production, to direct a very different sort of play: William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” It was the Bard’s first tragedy and is widely regarded as perhaps the worst play with his name on it. It’s also his most violent.

“I think it was a big experiment for him,” said Hatley, Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s associate artistic director. “It’s got all the marks of a young, inexperienced playwright. In any given Shakespeare play there are three or four unforgettable moments. But in ‘Titus Andronicus’ there are three or four unforgettable moments in every scene. I jokingly refer it to as Shakespeare’s big summer popcorn movie.”

ALLISON LONG

Tamora and Saturninus (Melinda McCrary and Forrest Attaway) are surrounded by murder victims in “Titus Andronicus.”

InTENsity: KC Playwrights 10 Min Fest

Coming Soon to The Fishtank Performance Studio! 

Robert Trussell’s Review of Bucket of Blood

Robert Trussell reviews The Living Room’s recent production of Bucket of Blood.

Tongue-in-cheek post-modernism gets a thorough workout in the Living Room production of “A Bucket of Blood,” a show in which the performers on stage appear to having at least as much fun as the audience.

Screenwriter-turned-playwright Mitch Brian serves up an amusing adaptation of a 1959 Roger Corman movie, a horror flick that satirized beatnik culture and the modern art world. Brian translates the essence of the film to the Living Room stage, more or less without commentary, and even assigns himself a small role as an art critic.

The plot revolves around a shy coffeehouse busboy named Walter (Matt Weiss), who puts up with a fair amount of verbal abuse from his employer (Damian Blake). Carla (Kimberely Queen) is friendlier to Walter, who is unabashedly enthralled by Maxwell Brock (Forrest Attaway), a beat poet given to extemporaneous improvisations with the house band.

Read the rest here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/30/3525820/two-performers-stand-out-in-bucket.html