TAME.
- Lighting Designer
WSC Avant Bard
Performed at
Gunston Arts Center,
Theatre Two
Nov 3 - Dec 11, 2016
New play by
Jonelle Walker
Director:
Angela Kay Pirko
Set Designer:
Eric McMorris
Lighting Designer:
E-hui Woo
Costume Designer:
Danielle Preston
Sound Designer:
Mehdi Raoufi
Props Designer:
Becky Mezzanote
SM:
Laura Schlachtmeyer
Prod. Dramaturg:
Maegan Clearwood
Dialect Coach:
Christine Hirrel
Fight Choreographer:
Danny Cackley
WEBSITE
Directed with a searing outlook by Angela Kay Pirko is a dark menacing production that chronicles an understandably enraged, but clearly self-destructive combatant named Cat.
Lighting Designer E-hui Woo makes moods galore especially during the various scene changes thru brown-out.
TAME. is bracing, cruel, and rebellious.
- David Siegel
Director Angela Kay Pirko has given the play vibrant and subtle production which brings out the strengths of Walker’s writing beautifully. Set designer Eric McMorris has created a plausible design for the period, which is detailed and suggestive of character. Lighting Designer E-hui Woo, Costume Designer Danielle Preston, and Sound Designer Mehdi Raoufi all contribute to give us that “you-are-there” feeling we want to have at a realistic play.
- Sophia Howes
And, trust me that it might make you uncomfortable. That you may hate it. Because it will challenge you, not because of its execution, which is simple, effective, and precise—thanks to director Angela Kay Pirko—but because it holds a mirror up to America’s past and, yet, reflects its present.
- Kelly McCorkendale
The stellar cast is supported by a wonderful design team. Eric McMorris’s period appropriate set is a comfy, kitschy kitchen backdrop for Cat and Patrick’s battles. Throughout the production, Danielle Preston’s costumes provide a meaningful contrast between Mama and Bea’s feminine, flowered dresses and Cat’s dressed-down denim. Cat’s gradual loss of control and agency is viscerally felt through E-hui Woo’s shuttering lights accompanied by piercing, unsettling sounds courtesy of Mehdi Raoufi.
- Norah Dick
On view in a world premiere from WSC Avant Bard, Jonelle Walker’s vivid, artfully unnerving “TAME.” is a retort to Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”
Ingeniously crafted, right up to its shocker ending, “TAME.” echoes Shakespeare while also depicting distinctive characters locked in a psychologically plausible battle of modern values and ideas.
- Celia Wren
I'm pretty torn. I didn't enjoy TAME., written by Jonelle Walker, but I also don't think I think I was supposed to enjoy it.
Perhaps to many audience members it was just a 1950s kitchen, well decorated and designed for the times. To me, it felt like a prison. Whether or not this was intentional, it seemed like a space in which all of the actors were too big for it. It was this trap, this life, the characters understandings of one another, they were never going to escape.
- Hannah Menchhoff
Wildly revamped Bard classic is lesbian-fueled rampage
- Patrick Folliard