Actress, writer, director and Goodman Artistic Associate Regina Taylor, has conceived of and curated an evening of five short plays, Transformations which continues the Goodman Studio Series Feb. 7-Mar. 9.
Each play, by an innovative contemporary writer, will feature a different director, using the same cast of six actors.
The plays are as follows:
Prophecy by Peter Handke, is directed by Marianne Kim. Six voices search for meaning in both the mythic and the mundane, and find fear as the patterns of a disheveled society are called into question.
Susan V. Booth directs The Owl Answers by Adrianne Kennedy. It's a world in which a subway is also the Tower of London, as well as Harlem hotel room. A young woman who is the Virgin Mary and also an owl, confronts the heroes of literature and the demons of her past. Dr. Kheal is Maria Irene Fornes' transforming contribution, directed by Taylor herself. The play tells of a metaphysics master, Dr. Kheal, who takes to the stage with a chalkboard to discover the meaning of hope.
Red Cross, by Sam Shepard, follows another day in Shepard's world, where a man gives a swimming lesson in a rundown hotel room to a maid who gives him a cure for crab lice, and a woman's head is precariously attached to her body. Cross is directed by Henry Godinez.
The final play of the evening is The One by Oliver Pitcher, directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce. Trapped in one room, BooBoo looks for the person who locked him in, finding an image that looks all too familiar. A "tightly constructed aria of rage," according to the theatre, The One pours out condemnation of the warfare within and without.
Taylor most recently was seen at the Goodman Studio in her one-woman show Escape From Paradise. In 1994, her two one-act plays Watermelon Rinds and Inside the Belly of the Beast appeared under the title The Ties That Bind.
Regina Taylor is best known to U.S. audiences from her role as Lilly Harper in the television series "I'll Fly Away." In March, she will be seen in the new CBS dramatic series, "Feds."
For more tickets or more information about the Goodman Theatre , please refer to the regional listing on Playbill On-Line.
--By Blair Glaser
