Theater

  Kathryn Metzger is a Chautauqua Institution success story. Metzger plays Catherine Givings in In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), the first production

  In the four centuries since Hamlet was written, there has probably been a bigger fan than Ted van Griethuysen. But he’d undoubtedly make the

  Tracy Christensen may be a costume designer, but the heart of her work is psychology. Christensen is responsible for clothing the cast of In

So first, about that title. In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) opened Saturday night at Chautauqua Theater Company. Contrary to rumors going around

Larissa Kokernot is new to Chautauqua Institution, but she’s already making an impact. Kokernot is the director of In the Next Room (or the vibrator

Tonight marks the first performance of Chautauqua Theater Company’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), and with it, the beginning of another theatrical

Chautauqua Institution’s commitment to the arts doesn’t stop at the professional level. On June 20, local students gathered in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall for a performance of 10 short plays written

Andrew Borba According to Andrew Borba, serving as artistic director of the Chautauqua Theater Company isn’t so different from directing a Shakespeare show. This season,

Plays take audiences out of their daily realities and place them in other worlds for small snippets of time. Playwright Michael Golamco’s “Build” does just that, but drops audiences into a world with which they aren’t necessarily familiar: the world of technology, artificial intelligence and virtual identities. “Build” opens at 8 p.m. Saturday at Bratton Theater as the second new play in Chautauqua Theater Company’s 2011 New Play Workshop Festival.

From now until July 31, Chautauqua Theater Company will be busy with the 2011 New Play Workshop Festival. In addition to the three new plays in this year’s NPW Festival, CTC, in conjunction with the Writers’ Center, is commissioning a play for the first time. The recipient of the Chautauqua Play Commission is playwright Kate Fodor. While Fodor is the first recipient of the Commission, this is not her first time in Chautauqua. Fodor already has brought two of her plays to CTC to be workshopped in NPW Festivals in the past.

Playwright Michael Mitnick sat down at his kitchen table late one evening in September 2009 to experiment with a few pages of a play he intended to use as his senior thesis. He finished the next morning with the entire first act of what would later become “Elijah” and would earn him a place in Chautauqua Theater Company’s 2011 New Play Workshop Festival. The play opens at 8 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater as the first of three new plays making their debut in this season’s festival.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote plays to share his message with a large number of people, an idea that seems old-fashioned in the age of new media. But what if Shaw still chose to write plays in the midst of the 21st century? “Is there something about the experience of live theater that actually is capable of creating more effective and profound change than sitting in front of a television or watching a movie? And I think the answer is probably yes,” Ethan McSweeny said.

Light is a part of everyone’s daily life, regardless of age, religion or location. Noah Craft sees the beauty and inspiration in this universality of light. This is what led him to enter and become a finalist in the Philips 2011 Light World Tour, a competition that allows one person with a passion for lighting to travel for three months finding new lighting inspirations.

Along with performing finished Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare productions, Chautauqua Theater Company keeps busy taking an active role in new play development. This will be evident beginning July 21 with the start of the New Play Workshop Festival.

The good news is that Chautauqua Theater Company is staging Anton Chekhov’s 1901 “Three Sisters,” one of the greatest plays ever written, through July 17. Further, good reports can be made of the chosen translation: by the late Slavic academic-turned-actor Paul Schmidt, it renders Chekhov’s then-contemporary idiom (the play is set in a stultifying provincial city in 1900) into plausible, listenable and unstilted American English, with only a few questionable decisions.

Actors and instructors will be on the spot in front of audience members at today’s Brown Bag lunch as they work through Shakespearean text with no prior rehearsal. This week’s Brown Bag lunch, which begins at 12:15 p.m. today at Bratton Theater, will be led by Associate Artistic Director Andrew Borba and Peter Francis James.