When Nicholas Martin came to Boston last season as artistic director of the Huntington Theatre, he announced that he would love to stage works by local playwrights, adding with a touch of mischief, "They gotta be there. They just gotta be there."
This is not a bad season to scout out the Boston-area play writing scene as Martin and other artistic directors try to bolster one of the weaker aspects of local theater. The Huntington Theatre Company is restaging Nixon's Nixon, by Russell Lees, who is also represented in The Xmas Files, a collection of short plays by local writers that starts Saturday after a preview Friday. Coming up are new plays by Laura Harrington, Jon Lipsky, John Kuntz, and Gip Hoppe (see schedule below). Add to that the three local plays that premiered last weekend - Joyce Van Dyke's A Girl's War, Ed Bullins' City Preacher, and Michael Bettencourt's Dancing at the Revolution -- and you have a season that is richer in quantity, at least, than in previous years. It is also a landscape that, not surprising for Boston, is marked by a penchant for politics....
Bettencourt, meanwhile, is so intent on humanizing Emma Goldman by contemporizing her in Dancing at the Revolution that he makes her a better spokeswoman for acupuncture than for anarchism. And if smugness were a capital offense, then one could conclude after seeing this play that Goldman got off lightly with deportation.
Dancing at the Revolution makes good use of a large ensemble, reminiscent of Moises Kaufman's work in Gross Indecency and The Laramie Project. Here the actors play everyone from judge and jury to warden and prisoners with great relish. There's a lot of potential in the ensemble; Michael Miller is a particular standout. It's a bad sign, though, when the ensemble is more interesting than the principals. There's not much to dance about at this revolution.
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