Theater & Dance
Edited by Virginia Gil
timeout.com/miami/theater @virginwrites
Deep impact
Scandalous, provocative and taboo: GableStage continues to thrill in its 18th year. By John Thomason
WHEN GABLESTAGE’S ARTISTIC Director Joseph Adler produced Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe in 2000, he wasn’t just testing the waters of onstage depravity and violence. He was ready to jump headfirst into a pool of controversy. The notorious 1993 play—a white-trash,
black-as-death comedy rife with vulgarity, bloodshed and sexual humiliation—puts even the strongest constitutions to the test. A more prudent director might have eased into such a production, carefully cementing a reputation before attempting a work this polarizing. But Adler staged Killer Joe as GableStage’s sixth show, on the heels of safe, established works by David Hare, John Steinbeck and John Patrick Shanley. “When I did Killer Joe, the then executive
director asked, ‘You’re going to do this, with nudity and violence? At the Biltmore? In Coral Gables?’ I said, ‘Yes, and it’s going to be the biggest success we’ve had this year,’ ” recalls Adler. “She said, ‘Put it in writing.’ And I did. And it was!” Adler, who became GableStage’s artistic director in 1998, is quick to point out
Adler
that the theater produces far more than just confrontational shockers. He stages historical dramas and political comedies and erudite monologues and chamber musicals. But his reputation for shows that illuminate the dark corners of the human condition was solidified early, in part because nobody
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else in the region was doing them at the time: 2004’s Bug, with its unsettling dental surgery, disembowelment and full-nude self- immolation; 2010’s Blasted, with its sodomy, exploded set and infant cannibalization; 2012’s Ruined, a harrowing exploration of sexual violence in war-torn Congo.
à February 9–May 17, 2017 Time Out Miami
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