CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES MYTHS SOMETHING Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Cassandra transported to a New Jersey suburb in 1960. There the same cycle of repression and revenge repeats itself. The ancient victims — two anti-heroines with loathsome mates, one religious martyr, and a disrespected prophetess — are now, respectively, two pill-popping, grievance-nursing…

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home.  Rick Stone the Blues Man  departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaBelle or Dionne Warwick. Bringing things down to basics, B.E.T.’s new revue salutes their own singers in founder-playwright Jackie Taylor’s most personal musical labor of love. A…

RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But this closeted playwright made one emotion his particular domain — loneliness. In  Picnic,  Come Back, Little Sheba,  and  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  (to close the Eclipse…

SIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like  Everyman  anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th  century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deeds.  Everybody, with its nonspecific title an improvement on the original, modernizes a hugely popular medieval masterwork. The anonymously written  Everyman  was an allegorical depiction of the titular Christian’s…

BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation and renewal: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit  Million Dollar Quartet  reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a Memphis studio that brought together Sun Records’ once and future icons: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash — and Elvis Presley. We see rock ‘n’ roll history…