Craig Wright's Grace thrives on various elements of discomfort. Next Act Theatre deftly navigates its way through the uncomfortably odd angles of Wright's script in its production of this tragic drama

 Puerto Rico-born Craig Wright is probably best known as a television writer. The man who created “Dirty Sexy Money” has a Masters of Divinity degree from United Theological Seminary and is also a playwright. His dark

 A Google image search for "sentimental Christmas movie" pulls up many images from Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Next Act Theatre does a brilliant job of bringing the sentimental story to the stage in a breathtakingly refreshing

 Philip Van Doren Stern was a 20th-century historian and editor who compiled short story collections and worked with the letters of such giants as Lincoln, Poe and Thoreau. He also wrote a 4,000-word short story called

 Mike Lew's Microcrisis is a deeply entertaining comedy about global finance. The interpersonal dynamics that drove the recent international financial collapse are succinctly played out in a fictional piece for the stage...

Strange and compelling stories have sprung from the basic setup of two actors and a park bench on a stage. Richard Lyons Conlon takes this premise in an interesting direction in the drama One Time. In a world premiere developed in part...

This weekend has been a study in contrast for me. Friday night, I saw the Rep’s reasonably massive production of Cabaret. Last night I saw a very minimalist, realistic, straight-ahead drama with Next Act. And I ended up preferring the Next Act show. There’s a kind of purity in seemingly simple drama that holds a kind of stage reality that’s far more electrifying than any visual or musical ...

In a magazine somewhere in the mid-1980’s, I ran across a brilliantly minimalist narrative piece called Nogard. The premise was very simple: Take an epic hero—one who has been through a long series of breathtaking adventures conquered adversity and come through it all to become legendary--take this hero and put him or her into a vacuum and see what happens. This is the intrinsic appeal of Ar...

Next Act Theatre’s Producing Artistic Director David Cecsarini has put together some really great shows at the Off Broadway Theatre. This week he opens a show that he stars in, wrote, directed and designed both the set AND the sound for. Cescarini took some time out of his work on purgatory to answer a few questions about the production. Me: What does the production design of the show feel l...