Palm Beach Dramaworks

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201 Clematis St West Palm Beach, FL 33401

561-514-4042

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Best Actress
Award Winner 2010

Description

For ten of its 11 seasons, Palm Beach Dramaworks was West Palm Beach's only professional theater company, and it has been a force to be reckoned with. Bearing the slogan "theater to think about," Dramaworks is recognized as the only tri-county playhouse to stage revivals of classics by Eugene O'Neill, Henrik Ibsen, and Harold Pinter on a regular basis.

2010 | Best Ensemble Cast

The three great actors of Copenhagen were not meant to play people, exactly, but rather their shades: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, meeting in a hazy afterlife and trying to reconstruct what may or may not have happened on a particular night in 1941. Bohr and Heisenberg were quantum physicists, and the models for this play's performances seemed to be the particles the men spent so much of their lives studying. Reconstructing that night, the actors zoom from one... More »
2010 | Best Director

Copenhagen is a play about quantum mechanics. At least, it is a play about the way one aspect of quantum mechanics, called "quantum indeterminacy," mirrors our understanding of history. In particular, it's about our understanding of one weird night in 1941 when Nazi scientist Werner Heisenberg visited his old friend, Niels Bohr, to talk about the Nazi plan to build a nuclear weapon. To mount it convincingly, Lewis had to understand a lot about the trickiest aspects of modern science, and he... More »
2010 | Best Actress

There was an amused look that Marjorie Lowe wore throughout her one-act performance as Anne, the wife of Jerry -- a character well-known to fans of the original Albee Play, Zoo Story, of which At Home is an expansion. She was exasperated with Jerry and even went through the motions of fighting with him -- but she didn't really fight with him. That look on her face belied it all, and it was a look of love. In almost every line, Lowe did a masterful job of communicating her and... More »
2009 | Best Theatrical Season

There is no doubt about it: Palm Beach Dramaworks' patrons are old. This year, there have been a few evenings when the second-youngest person in attendance was our theater critic's mother. But really, who cares Because unlike some theaters with aged audiences, Dramaworks refuses to get by on showbiz nostalgia. When the theater did produce something old, it was something daring: Eugene O'Neill's shattering A Moon for the Misbegotten or Eugene Ionesco's freaky The Chairs. And its newer stuff... More »
2009 | Best Supporting Actress

For good Darwinian reasons, we remember trauma with more clarity than pleasure. This, perhaps, is why tragediennes win more awards than their comedienne counterparts. Last year, Nanique Gheridian turned in a memorable performance as Sheila, the frightened, mousy wife of razor-witted Colin (played by Todd Allen Durkin). Abused, afraid to speak above a squeak, and seemingly incapable of articulating an opinion about anything, she spent the whole play trying her best to disappear. She seemed to... More »
2009 | Best Actress

Eugene Ionesco's plays are fantastical imaginative flights with no stable anchors in the real world. His characters often speak nonsense words, swing from states of extreme agitation to euphoria with no obvious catalyst, and find themselves in unlikely or impossible situations. It takes a good actor to connect this stuff to an audience in any way beyond the abstractly cerebral, and Barbara Bradshaw is very, very good. In The Chairs, she played one-half of an elderly couple (the other half... More »
2008 | Best Theater For Drama

Palm Beach Dramaworks is a tiny company in a tiny space that, thanks to its Palm Beach subscription base, has production values to rival most theaters three times its size. And for serious drama, intimacy matters. Watching The Voice of the Prairie at PBD, you get the sense that you're in a cramped, dark studio watching a radio play produced live. When they did The Fourth Wall, you truly felt like you were hidden behind the fourth wall of somebody's living room. PBD often lays hands on some... More »
2008 | Best Director

This paper wasn't very nice to The Fourth Wall. Essentially, we called it a beautiful, exciting failure. We were right, too. But The Fourth Wall was only a failure because its ambitions were so large, and raised our hopes to delirious, irrational heights. Now that we have some perspective, while we still wish writer A.R. Gurney had taken his own ideas a little more seriously, we can understand how stunningly those same ideas were realized by the folks at Palm Beach Dramaworks. The Fourth... More »
2008 | Best Ensemble Cast

The Fourth Wall was a show with a special shine. Though dealing in very heavy material, actors Peter Thomasson, Angie Radosh, Patti Gardener, and Gregg Weiner honed in on the wittiest, craziest, and funniest lines and moods in A.R. Gurney's script and made them dance. The show could easily have been done at half the speed, or half the intensity, of PBD's production, and come off like an especially bizarre series of events in anybody's living room. But the weird glint in Angie Radosh's eye... More »
2005 | Best Theater

Even in its infancy, crammed into a tiny space on Clematis Street in West Palm, Dramaworks has always demonstrated a fidelity to quality and integrity. Now in its fourth season, the company is enjoying a new theater space and a string of superior productions. What makes the 'works work For starters, this company doesn't talk down to its audiences; it challenges them with rarely produced classics by Sartre, Albee, and other giants. And then there's the fine array of talent, featuring some of... More »

"Master Harold ... and the Boys" at Palm Beach Dramaworks: A Didactic Journey Into Racism's Insidious Core

By John Thomason | Thu, April 12, 2012

In light of the tragic recent events in Sanford, it seems like the appropriate time for a play about racism — especially the insidious kind that manifests itself when "provoked." Playwright Athol Fugard, a white South African who grew up during hi... More »
"The Pitmen Painters" at Palm Beach Dramaworks: Where Miners Make an Impression

By John Thomason | Thu, February 23, 2012

It's the opening scene of The Pitmen Painters, and a group of British miners is listening to a wannabe art professor lecture them on Renaissance paintings. To art scholars, the man's words and the visual references he brings on an old slide projec... More »
Rags to Triumph

By Devin Desjarlais | Thu, February 16, 2012

“The Pitmen Painters” are a gaggle of British miners in 1930s England. These cats enroll in an art-appreciation course only to gain recognition from society’s upper echelon. Want a roller-coaster ride through personal expression and societal press... More »
"All My Sons" at Palm Beach Dramaworks: An Arthur Miller Classic Retains Its Relevance in a Glittering New Theater

By John Thomason | Thu, November 24, 2011

If there had been an Occupy movement in post-World War II America, the fictional character Joe Keller in Arthur Miller's All My Sons would have made for a model nemesis. Joe is a one-percenter, a war profiteer, and a manipulative snake who probabl... More »
American Tragedies

By Brandon K. Thorp | Thu, November 10, 2011

All My Sons was Arthur Miller's first great play. Originally published and performed in 1947, it was the beginning of Miller's 20 years of relentless brilliance -- 20 years in which he explored the dimensions and mapped the fracture points of the ... More »
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bpbnewtimesbestof | Palm Beach, FL | 139 Reviews

| Wed, May 6, 2009

Palm Beach Dramaworks is a tiny company in a tiny space that, thanks to its Palm Beach subscription base, has production values to rival most theaters three times its size. And for serious drama, intimacy matters. Watching The Voice of the Prairie at PBD, you get the sense that you're in a cramped, dark studio watching a radio play produced live. When they did The Fourth Wall, you truly felt like you were hidden behind the fourth wall of somebody's living room. PBD often lays hands on some of the best actors in the region, and this closeness lets you see more of their work than is possible at any other venue: the subtle darting of Todd Allen Durkin's eyes; the twitch at the corner of Nanique Gheridian's nervous smile. These are small things, but they add a whole new layer to every good show PBD puts out there. Word is, the company is currently seeking a new home. Let's hope it's not too big.