Reviews and Articles
2007–2008 Season
Stage Review: Haunting 'Breakfast With Mugabe' Satisfies
By Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wednesday, February 13, 2008
“A joke making the rounds in Harare, Zimbabwe: A man on the way home from a petrol run is caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic. A stranger taps on his car window. Cautiously, he rolls it down and asks what he wants...."
Stage Review: 'Mugabe' Provides Much to Consider
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Tuesday, February 12, 2008
"From the moment 'Breakfast with Mugabe' begins, you can feel the tension...."
Stage Preview: Evil Spirits, African Politics and a Highly Anticipated Role for Local Actor Don Marshall Spark Quantum Theatre's Breakfast With Mugabe
By Bill O'Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper, Wednesday, February 6, 2008
"In a shuttered department store, Quantum Theatre's Karla Boos directs a rehearsal for the U.S. premiere of Fraser Grace's Breakfast With Mugabe. The scene is a tense one..."
Stage Preview: the Drama of Politics
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Sunday, February 3, 2008
“For Quantum Theatre artistic director Karla Boos, the second floor of the former Lazarus Department store, Downtown, is the perfect setting for a play about two men attempting to exorcise ghosts both past and present...."
Stage Preview: Quantum Play Sits Down With Zimbabwe Dictator Mugabe
By Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, February 7, 2008
"Fraser Grace's 'Breakfast With Mugabe' is fully consistent with Quantum Theatre's practice of presenting edgy, contemporary theater that does not shy away from controversial topics...."
Stage Review: 'Therese Raquin' Flows on Pool Stage
By Anna Rosenstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wednesday, October 3, 2007
"When I was little, we used to have a fish tank that I hated. Still, I felt compelled to watch the slimy creatures, swimming through their tiny world. Watching them watching me triggered a sort of existential crisis-in charge, perhaps, of a world I didn't understand but with the nagging sensation of being watched. If them, I thought of the stupid fish, why not stupid me, as well? This flashback was brought to me-and you-courtesy of Quantum Theatre's production of 'Therese Raquin.' It's staged in the swimming pool of Carnegie Library, Braddock. The audience sits on risers built over the pool and the actors are below, literally and metaphorically in the deep end...."
Stage Review: 'Therese Raquin' Submerges Audience in Taut Drama
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Tuesday, October 2, 2007
"It sounds like a joke, or at least the solution to a game of Clue: 'Therese Raquin' in a swimming pool with a cast. But there's serious dramatic purpose for Quantum Theatre's setting for its latest production-a defunct swimming pool inside the Braddock Carnegie Library...."
Stage Preview: Director Pursues Full Life With Quantum, Point Park
By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sunday, September 30, 2007
"Based in San Francisco but retired from his West Coast teaching jobs, stage director and choreographer Rodger Henderson could choose to be anywhere...."
Stage Preview: Going Deep
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thursday, September 27, 2007
"For its next production, Quantum Theatre is going off the deep end. The cast of 'Therese Raquin' will descend into the depths of a long-empty swimming pool in the Braddock Carnegie Library to perform Emile Zola's tale of obsession and desire on the rust-stained white ceramic tile floor of this once-vibrant public amenity...."
Stage Review: Quantum Surrounds Hartwood Stables With Beauty of 'Meaulnes'
By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, August 9, 2007
"Another world premiere - the third in a row for Quantum Theatre - and maybe you're thinking, every time my kid gets up on the coffee table, that's a world premiere, too. Sure. But this is Quantum, one of our most adventuresome, accomplished pro companies, so 'world premiere' means something. And in the case of this famous novel from France, 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' and a noted adaptor-director-composer team from England, the 'world' part means even more...."
Stage Review: Le Grand Meaulnes
By Robert Isenberg, Pittsburgh City Paper, Wednesday, August 8, 2007
"In France, Le Grand Meaulnes is considered a classic novel. No student would graduate from a French ecole without reading it, just as every American seems to read The Catcher in the Rye. Written by Alain Fournier on the cusp of World War I, Meaulnes has dominated nearly a century of literature classes, even though the book is almost unknown outside of France...."
Stage Review: Quantum Production Encapsulates Sentimental Mood of 'Meaulnes'
By Alice T. Carter Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Tuesday, August 7, 2007
"For many French people, Alain-Fournier's 'Le Grand Meaulnes' is a much-loved classic French novel that evokes a romantic, idyllic era and a way of life that was destroyed by the outbreak of World War I...."
Stage Preview: Quantum Ventures to Hartwood Stables For'le Grand Meaulnes
By Anna Rosenstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, August 2, 2007
“The Stables at Hartwood Acres display beautifully on a summer day. The horses graze peacefully in the field. The rugged cobblestone of the courtyard and stone stable walls do little to divulge their age...."
Stage Preview: Hartwood Stables Set Stage for Quantum Premiere
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thursday, August 2, 2007
"As soon as she saw the stables at Hartwood Acres, director Di Trevis knew she had found the perfect place to stage the world premiere of 'Le Grand Meaulnes' for Quantum Theatre...."
Stage Review: 'Billy the Kid' Is Renegade Theater
By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, June 21, 2007
"We expect Quantum Theatre to do the unusual, challenging and unexpected. But with "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid," it does so by presenting a theatrical adventure that isn't, in the usual sense, a play...."
Bottoms up: the World Premiere of Billy the Kid Turns Traditional Theater on Its Head
By Bill O'Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper, Wednesday, June 13, 2007
"The actors rehearsing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid don't have a script...and it wouldn't help them if they did. Because if director Dan Jemmett were using one, it would include stage directions like 'Just try anything for now. Just to stimulate our imaginations and pretend what it could be.'....
Stage Preview: Former House of Porn Becomes the Refuge for Billy the Kid
By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, June 14, 2007
"Dan Jemmett says of Karla Boos, 'To no one else in the world could I have said, I want to do this in a disused cinema and have her say, I think I have one.' What the artistic director of Quantum Theatre had in mind was the North Side's Garden Theater, just rescued from the porn business after a long struggle by the City of Pittsburgh...."
Quantum Stages 'Wake' for Famed Outlaw Billy the Kid
By Alice T. Carter, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thursday, June 14, 2007
“European director Dan Jemmett has spent the past month searching for Billy the Kid inside the moldering Garden Theater on the North Side...."
Former X-Rated Garden Theatre Set for a Porn-Free Play
By Bonnie Pfister, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Monday, June 11, 2007
"The infamous Garden Theatre on the North Side will have its first post-porn performance this week...."
Former North Side Porn Theater Awaits Restoration As a Possible Arts Space
By Timothy McNulty, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sunday, May 20, 2007
"In the years before it turned to X-rated films, the Garden Theater was so averse to hosting off-color movies that it would not even show 'Frankenstein.'...."