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Dinner With Friends

Sometimes it seems that our lives only gain meaning retrospectively. A moment only becomes important in the context of subsequent events: people we meet, opportunities we forego. Adding complication to this reality, the meaning of events that would logically seem to be frozen in the past can take on radically different meaning as time goes by—as love expires, as lies are revealed, as offences are forgiven. Pam MacKinnon’s new production of Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Dinner With Friends, examines this reality with aching beauty and sometimes mocking humor as it explores what happens to two married couples, longtime friends, when one couple breaks up.

Bridges of Madison County

To begin, Kelli O’Hara, one of the reigning queens of Broadway, is enchanting as Francesca, an Italian woman who marries an American serviceman after World War II in order to escape the poverty and despair of Naples. Her voice is gloriously matched to Brown’s delicious score and she and co-star Steve Pasquale enjoy an onstage chemistry that is alternately comfortable and steamy.

Branches From the Same Tree

They’re having a whole lot of fun over at the Paul Robeson Theatre in the African American Cultural Center with Branches From the Same Tree, an unapologetically over-the-top soap opera of a show with plenty of family secrets, smoldering grudges, and plot twists to keep things humming along.

Talking About Mae West

On Friday, March 7, 3-4:30pm, Artvoice theater editor (and Buffalo State assistant dean of Arts and Humanities) Anthony Chase will lecture on “Mae West, Comedy, and the Disenfranchised Woman Playwright” in Ketchum Hall, Room 320 on the Buffalo State campus.



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