Karen Aldridge, a Chicago actress of longstanding international acclaim, finds herself playing a bizarre but compelling character at the shoebox-sized A Red Orchid Theatre: She’s Agatha, a terrifyingly stern spinster sister stuck in a rundown manse on a simulacrum of the wild Yorkshire moors, a fever nightmare of Charlotte Brontë-like origin.
But Aldridge, who is powerful enough not just to intimidate anyone walking in off the street but to raise the entire stakes of director Kirsten Fitzgerald’s production of Jen Silverman’s “The Moors,” is such a remarkable actress that all of that fast-paced intensity constantly is underpinned by vulnerability. Silverman’s 2016 play, a satirical deconstruction (or mashup) of Brontë-like mythology, has designated Agatha as a figure so controlling as to even panic the house Mastiff (played by Guy Van Swearingen), when he’s not playing out his relationship with a local moor-hen (Dado). But I think the playwright also wanted us to ponder some version of a latent theme in all of the Brontë novels: how, in isolation both geographic and gender-forced, does a woman allow herself to be seen? (Chris Jones)
The Kansas City Star features the new book
Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens and we are told that the author
hopes to write a future book on England’s Brontë sisters (Jon Niccum)
This shows in its most public face; the website is buzzy, with excellent photography and some interesting and unusual first-person stories, but cliched and riddled with assumptions, omissions, generalisations and tin ear errors.
A list of writers, poets and playwrights mentions Caedmon, the Brontës and The Yorkshire Post’s own Ian McMillan, but manages to leave out Marsden’s Simon Armitage who is only the nation’s Poet Laureate. (Jayne Dowle)
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