"The Welkin" by Frank Theatre at Gremlin Theatre

My previous experience with British playwright Lucy Kirkwood is the three-person drama The Children, an intimate, personal, and political story about the fallout of a nuclear disaster, which Jungle Theater produced in 2019 shortly after it premiered on Broadway. Her 2020 play The Welkin is quite the opposite in scale, featuring a cast of 16 and set in the 18th Century. But it's similar in the way it deals with thorny issues that are both personal and political, and I can't think of a better theater company to bring us the regional premiere than Frank Theatre. It's epic in scale and length (nearly three hours) and in the way that it depicts the arduous life of women in 18th Century England, with parallels to the here and now. The cast is a veritable Who's Who of #TCTheater female actors, and watching them tell this story on Gremlin's intimate stage under Wendy Knox's expert direction is a thrill, if a bit of a dark and depressing one. So take a nap, have an afternoon coffee, and go see this astounding regional premiere production of The Welkin (continuing through March 29).

"The Children" at Jungle Theater

The Jungle Theater produced some of my favorite work in #TCTheater last year, and they're showing no signs of stopping that trend in 2019. Their first show of the year (my fifth, but who's counting), is the first post-Broadway production of The Children by Lucy Kirkwood (not to be confused with the re-imagined Medea play The Children by Michael Elyanow produced by Pillsbury House a few years ago). In a pre-show speech by Artistic Director Sarah Rasmussen (who has only made the Jungle better in her short tenure), she said that this team of actors, designers, and director are a master class of putting together a piece of theater. I couldn't agree more. Everything about this play is impeccable, from this very specific design that transports the audience to a seaside cottage after a nuclear disaster, to the three-person cast of beloved veterans of stage and screen, and everything else that allows this magic to happen. Get yourself to Uptown (as much of a pain as that sometimes is) to see this brilliant work of theater that will leave you contemplating life for days to come.