Throw the rulebook right out the window. It won’t help you anyway. And forget what you think you know about Chess as that won’t help you here either. Can’t even say “not your Grandfather’s Chess” because there are so many different variations on this concept album-turned-musical-come-concert-album that it’s hard to pinpoint which one is the one for a standard basis of comparison. Based on an idea by Tim Rice, inspired wholly if not incompletely by historical events.
Order or justice? Henry Kissinger made a quote about it. That quote gets referenced by one of the characters in Ayad Akhtar’s volatile and evocative drama, Disgraced, which is now on stage at the Vagabond Players in Fells Point. Directed by Matthew Sean Mitchell, this 90-minute intense drama takes place inside one apartment on New York’s Upper East Side during the summer and fall of 2011, one decade after the terrorist attack on September 11th.
People want things to make sense. People need things to make sense, especially when the universe upends all logic and forces grief upon life through loss. A poignant and evocative drama written by David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole examines loss and more importantly coping and moving forward with loss in a world that no longer makes sense to those that have suffered. Directed by Eric C. Stein, this Vagabond Players production hits the mark in taking a myopically focused drama and making it readily available for everyone who has suffered loss in their life.