A couple of thought-provoking plays open this weekend on stages a short drive away. Fort Pierce’s Pineapple Playhouse is staging Terrance McNally’s “Mothers and Sons” about a mother 20 years after the death of her son who decides to drop in on his surviving partner, now married with a son.
McNally’s 90-minute, four-character drama that played on Broadway in 2014 spans a momentous era, from the AIDS epidemic to gay marriage.
McNally is a veteran of similarly themed dramas, among them “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” in 1991, and four years later, “Love! Valor! Compassion!” He is also the author of “André’s Mother,” the prequel to the play opening at Pineapple.
Pineapple Playhouse, the home of St. Lucie Community Theatre, a volunteer theater group that dates back to 1949, is at 700 W. Weatherbee Road, off S. U.S. 1 in Fort Pierce, south of Jetson’s appliance store and north of Midway Road.
Meanwhile, Friday is opening night at Melbourne’s Henegar Center for Robert Askins’ “Hand of God,” in the center’s upstairs Studio Theatre. “Hand of God” just closed on Broadway in January after being nominated for a Tony for Best New Play. The premise, flagged “adults only” by Henegar, is based in the southern evangelical tradition that uses puppets to teach young people how to avoid Satan. When the pastor asks a recent widow to take over the church puppet club, her teenage son turns out to have a puppet with a raging libido, and things quickly go to hell in a hand puppet.
The Henegar Center is at the edge of Melbourne’s historic downtown district at 625 E. New Haven Ave. Both shows run through Sept. 25 and both theaters charge $20. And both flag the plays as having adult themes and strong language. That ought to sound refreshing to serious drama lovers in Vero, where the community theater, the Theatre Guild, reportedly won’t stage plays that have “God” and “damn” as a compound word.
Speaking of mature audiences, Riverside Theatre’s new educational program for adults has to be hoping for at least a little immaturity in its new Stage Combat class starting on Monday. I love imagining how these grown-ups are going to put their knowledge to good use, but of course, it’s meant for actors and the instructor, Ben Porch, has a master’s in stage movement and has taught stage combat in the theater department at IRSC.
And for those who prefer to perform cerebrally, there’s a great new series of seminars called Backstage Access. They’ll be offered in conjunction with each of Riverside’s Main Stage productions this season. Taught by former college theater professor Jim Van Valen – he’s the new director of education who came up with all this – the three-hour seminars, four to a course, will look at the history of each production, the themes involved, and particular staging challenges. Guest artists and crew will lecture too.
The first course starts in mid-October in advance of “Ring of Fire,” a jukebox musical about the life and music of Johnny Cash. The acting classes start in October; dance classes got underway last week.
The King Center’s Studio Theatre is an intimate space, but in a solo concert next Wednesday night it will have to contain drummer Terry Bozzio’s entire drum kit, billed as the largest in the world. Bozzio, who once played with Frank Zappa, Jeff Beck and the band Missing Persons, looks a little like Marius at the barricade seated in the middle of it all.
A passionate drummer since the age of 6, Bozzio messed around on makeshift drum sets for seven years before finally persuading his dad to pay for drum lessons. That was after seeing the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It was a good investment: He not only earned a college scholarship in percussion and timpani, he ended up with a lucrative career.
Bozzio’s trademark feat is being able to play Zappa’s “The Black Page,” a bear of a work so dense with notes that its chart is nearly black. Equally fluent in rock and classical drumming, he has played with garage bands and baroque ensembles, and even had a stint on Broadway playing in “Godspell” in the 1970s.
