Nathan Tailleur '14 reviews the Kitchen Theater's production of Call Me Waldo.

Events occuring this week on Cornell's campus and around Ithaca. 

The Schwartz Center's adaptation of Sartre's No Exit proves as hellacious as trying to understand exactly what Sartre was on about. 

Gina Cargas looks at Neat, a deeply affecting one-man play about civil rights, disability and coming-of-age.

The Sun reviews the Ithaca premier of Circle Mirror Transformation.

The Sun reviews the latest from the Kitchen Theater.

A young, smartly dressed newlywed named Sibyl (Emily Renee Bennett), and her slightly older, but no less debonair husband, Elyot (Brian Dykstra) absorb the soothing seascape from their cheery hotel terrace in the opening scene of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, now playing at Ithaca’s newly-renovated Kitchen Theatre. Sibyl energetically conveys her satisfaction with the setting, as well as the company of her beloved spouse, while Elyot acts by and large blasé, for he is at this point a seasoned honeymooner, with one marriage already under his belt. His new wife is eager to stamp out pleasant thoughts of his former spouse, imploring him, “You do hate her, don’t you?” but Elyot will not concede on this point. Sibyl is determined to secure conjugal bliss though, and Elyot ultimately appeases her in the deadpan English way, pledging that he is “tremendously, magnificently” pleased with the present scenario.

BOP: The North Star is an original play (premiered at the Kitchen Theater Sunday evening!) written and directed by Emilie Stark-Menneg. It was created through a collaborative process involving the actors, musicians and dancers in the play, as well as with Cornell English professor Prof. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, upon whose poetry the play is based. The play incorporates six poems from Professor Van Clief-Stefanon’s newest collection of poetry, Open Interval, recently nominated for a National Book Award. The focal poem, which returns several times in the 60-minute play, is entitled (can you guess?) “Bop: The North Star.”

It took a little bit of cajoling and self-conscious laughter at first. But by the end of the evening, each time Marc Bamuthi Joseph ended a stream of rhapsodic, rhythmic poetry with “word word,” the audience, as if cued by magic, came in with their response: “word word.”

In In The Spoken World, presented by the Kitchen Theater last weekend, Bamuthi journeyed through dazzling landscape of movement and sound, in a poetic exploration of what it means to be a part of a race, a family, and a community.

Samuel Beckett isn’t for everyone. His novels are vast, nearly un-peopled monologues, an obsessive-compulsive’s droning echo chambers, which depict the struggle to keep oneself upright and hygienic in a bleak, mundane, thoroughly contaminated solipsistic mindscape. Admittedly, I have tried to read several of Beckett’s novels, only to abandon them half-way. Each time I begin one anew, I start to feel like one of his characters: haggardly trying to go on with a dim resolve, keeping a faith that I know will fail me, waiting for something (anything!) to happen.