THE WHITE DEVIL This wild Shakespearean-era gem could run away with a less talented troupe. But PAC turns this White Devil into a lean, muscular banquet of evil. With aggressive yet sensitive trimming, director and PAC cofounder Damon Bonetti tames this mad beast, and, in a master-stroke, he sets the play in the world of 1940s-'50s film noir. The cast trusts Webster's poetry to reveal character and create momentum.
HE WHO GETS SLAPPED Director Damon Bonetti transforms a complicated script into a sustained and haunting tremolo. For this play-behind-the-play, a theatrical nature inherently infuses the action. On top of which Bonetti adds bits of acrobatics, juggling, tumbling, balancing and dancing of all kinds (led by Terry Brennan), to give a small taste of what’s happening in the ring, just on the other side of the curtain. What results is a mixture of realism and surrealism, and a story doing it’s own kind of daring tight-rope walk
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS The first time I saw a stage adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days” it seemed to go on for 80 days. Non-stop adventure after adventure grew tedious in a lackluster telling. So for me, the production that opened Friday night at Hedgerow Theatre Company is a revelation: constantly amusing, moving like a typhoon (it includes a typhoon), and beautifully acted to boot. Its success depends greatly on the inventiveness of a five-member cast and the director, in this case the all-around theater artist Damon Bonetti. In his staging, people pop from windows, doors and balconies. They use props, trunks and movable boxes and their own bodies to conjure everything from the typhoon I mentioned to a quick ride on an elephant.
BOEING BOEING The situation sounds dated and misogynistic, but Bonetti smartly recognizes that the playwright creates three strong, independent, vivacious women in Meredith Beck's Gloria (American: TWA), Hanna Gaffney's Gabriella (Italian: Air Italia), and Allison Bloechl's Gretchen (German: Lufthansa)....Bonetti stages Boeing Boeing with a farce's requisite frenetic action, aided by Zoran Kovcic's colorful set and its six doors (each a different pastel), abstract pastel paintings of different shapes, and even custom-designed "mod" furniture, all vaguely suggesting the psychedelic swinging '60s, but mainly just kooky and fun...The entire cast, including Trice Baldwin's magnificently funny Berthe (Bernard's taciturn French live-in maid who ferociously rules his apartment), plunges into the play's physical comedy with inspired verve. Dashes, leaps, pratfalls, slapstick violence, and slithering are accomplished with energy and skill, and without that stilted choreographed look that makes clever movement feel stale. Intelligent, committed acting isn't wasted on farce — as Boeing Boeing shows, it's a requirement.
RAGE OF ACHILLES Though Rage of Achilles is often verbally witty and brisk, it also reveals real war in all its brutality. Damon Bonetti’s smart production perfectly balances moments of humor and humanity with the war’s epic bloodiness. While Ian Rose’s large battles are almost dance-like, the violence suffered by the common man — crunching bones, bloody spurts — is shockingly real. Woven all through are The Iliad’s classic themes — "If we act like heroes, we’ll be heroes,” Dimitri naively posits — refocused through modern understanding of war’s horrors and its unnamed victims.
THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE August’s complex structure of direct address monologues, couples’ dialogues, and alternating parallel discussions requires precise timing in both the direction and delivery of the script, and director Damon Bonetti and his cast don’t miss a beat as the four distinct characters’ reveal their innermost thoughts and backstories, consider their options, and re-evaluate their inter-relationships.
THE GUN SHOW The show is paced with a rhythm that keeps you open to receiving information and ready to go one to the next dramatic encounter. Director Damon Bonetti shares prominently in the show’s success by creating a rich texture for the production and establishing a deft juxtaposition between the researched and the personal...The script stays on stage throughout THE GUN SHOW, and Bonetti puts it to use clever ways, to call attention to a situation or to create tension the way Alfred Hitchcock would use a McGuffin. (It dawns on me that Bonetti starred in The 39 Steps for Theatre Horizon and directed it for Hedgerow.)
BLOOD WEDDING The Philadelphia Artists' Collective could have set their Blood Wedding on a huge mound of dirt. Or in the bowels of the sea, or the boiling surf of a volcano. That's how rooted in the earth and nature Federico Garcia Lorca's 1932 play remains - so much so that even today, in this inventive production filled with song, dance, and poetry, it startles in its passion and violence...Blood Wedding also marks the first time the Philadelphia Artists' Collective is working inside an actual theater space. Damon Bonetti's production, however, eschews any sense of artifice or distance the Mandell Theater's proscenium might provide. The long, portico-threaded wall of Matt Campbell's set serves as church, vineyard, and mountainside, and by thrusting the audience onto a few rows of seats on the stage, it becomes intimate, seating us at the wedding reception, letting us eavesdrop on the gossipy neighbors.
THE 39 STEPS Director Bonetti has acted at Hedgerow in the past, but this is his first time directing there. He recently played the role of Hannay at Theatre Horizon in Norristown, so he brought a great deal of familiarity with the script and its challenges to this production. I know many of the gags were scripted, but one could clearly see Bonetti’s point of view in executing them; the staging is truly clever and well-timed.
TRUE STORY Though EM Lewis’s 80-minute thriller TRUE STORY pays homage to Raymond Chandler’s detective-story and film-noir tradition of the 1930s and ‘40s, the play offers a more current (cell-phone era) exploration of the genre, combining the twists and turns of a gripping murder mystery with the profound human issues of coping with loss, assuming responsibility, the nature of truth, and the desire for justice. Passage Theatre Company’s world-premiere production, directed with wit and suspense by Damon Bonetti, succeeds in delivering all the surprises, humor, emotion, and psychology inherent in the script.
THE SEA PLAYS The two short plays, seamlessly performed in an hour in the deep wooden bowels of this historic and handsome sailing vessel, are immensely helped by the authenticity of the setting. And, with a cast of excellent actors (outstanding are David Blatt and Keith Conallen) under the inventive direction of Damon Bonetti, this is a theatre experience that is both moving and engrossing.
CHANGES OF HEART Changes of Heart, or, The Double Inconstancy is an eighteenth century French comedy by Pierre De Marivaux, translated and adapted by Stephen Wadsworth. Damon Bonetti, who directs this new production by the Philadelphia Artists' Collective, styles the play as a screwball comedy and watching this cast is like watching a master class in shtick...Although the original setting is the French court, and although there's a violet chaise longue and many gilt picture frames, you're likely to be reminded of bits and pieces of 1930s movies, with their over-the-top mugging, pratfalls, flirting with the audience and any kind of exaggerated stuff anybody can come up with.