By SHARON EBERSON
At a time when federal funding for the arts is so precarious, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my past few weeks of attending theater.
By the numbers, starting on January 14 through Sunday, February 2, I have seen nine plays, three musicals, a reading, a cabaret and a concert.
ACT I: The Festival
Five of the plays were college productions during the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region 2, spread out among four days and the stages at Pittsburgh Playhouse and Pitt’s Stephen Foster Memorial, and including a University of Pittsburgh production of playwright TJ Young’s The Inseparables. Young, a Carnegie Mellon faculty member who has participated in the festival as a student and instructor, received the region’s 2025 Gold Medallion Award.
I participated as a mentor in workshops for the Institute of Theatre Journalism and Advocacy for the second straight year, helping participating students gather portfolios that included a review, a pitch and an interview subject (thank you, Wali Jamal, for joining me in the latter effort). Desiré Correa, a dual journalism and theater major at Muskingum University (Ohio) will go on to represent our region in a national competition.
ACT II: New York, New York
The three musicals were on Broadway the charming new show Maybe Happy Ending, which I highly recommend, sandwiched between two dynamos in revivals, Audra McDonald in Gypsy and Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard. Maybe Happy Ending – in simplistic terms, a robot romcom – delights with a synchronicity of performance, story, music and innovative design that earns all of the raves it has garnered.
The New York trip included Hugh Jackman: From New York, With Love, on opening night of a months-long, 24-show residency at Radio City Music Hall. Is there such a thing as a Hugh-ophile? I suppose I am one. My preferences remain the arena show here in Pittsburgh and Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway, a 2011-12 concert/show at the relatively intimate Broadhurst Theatre. But it was cool to see his buddy Ryan Reynolds make an appearance and, for anyone seeing him for the first time, I’m sure his “Greatest Showman” status remains intact.
Act III: Pittsburgh Goes Solo
I came home on Sunday, January 26, and here’s my week since then:
MONDAY: A City Rewinds reading, appropriately in the Lillie Theatre, looking back at the legacy of Kuntu Repertory Theater.
TUESDAY: The stagecraft and puppetry sensation Life of Pi, a drama not for the feint of heart, at the PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh/Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presentation.
WEDNESDAY: Back at City Theatre, catching up with Christopher Rivas’ The Real James Bond Was … Dominican, an incisive look at how pop culture and reality intertwined to reset Rivas’ thinking on identity and self-esteem.
THURSDAY: Laundry.
FRIDAY: The theater community, friends and family turned out for Mood for Love, Catherine Kolos’ comeback cabaret at the Greer. She sparkled, from her gown to her voice to her messages about love and sharing her experiences surviving a brain aneurysm while working in Albuquerque, N.M.
SATURDAY: Quantum Theatre is currently entrenched in the remodeled Braddock Carnegie Library, where Mark Povinelli gives an extraordinary performance in the title role of The Return of Benjamin Lay, the real-life 19th-century Quaker, sailor and staunch abolitionist, who at 4 feet tall took a stand against the colossal injustice of slavery. (Through February 23.)
SUNDAY (TODAY): Jay Sefton is riveting in Unreconciled, his story of surviving clergy abuse as an adolescent, which I left as a teary mess.
TO SUM UP …
at barebones’ Braddock black box theater through February 16, 2025.
Witnessing performers reach into a deep well of personal experience and share a piece of themselves has pushed all the buttons this week, stirring deep emotions, inspiring empathy and promoting understanding in ways that
That’s what I was thinking as I wiped away tears after Sefton‘s remarkable one-man show. To say I laughed and cried is to not do the Unreconciled experience justice. The humor amid the horror is often in the absurdity of the situations and Sefton’s deft characterizations of friends, family, clergy and all the players in his life as a playful kid, then victim, survivor and advocate.
As a 13-year-old, 30 years ago, Sefton was chosen to play Jesus in a bizarre Passion Play, written and overseen by a Philadelphia priest. The ensuing abuse was psychological and violent, as well as sexual. The real-life priest, who was eventually dismissed from the church, was described in a 2005 grand jury report as “engaged in depraved and sadistic behavior with many boys.”
My visceral connection was to Sefton’s relationship with his parents – he plays both, among multiple characters. The compassion shown by his Philly tough father lands as both endearing and wrenching.
The Catholic Church and Pennsylvania lawmakers take it on the chin for their meager or nonexistent attempts at reconciliation and reparations. Justice, in this case, has not been served.
What I was left with, after the past week, was a renewed appreciation for artists who brave being so very vulnerable in public, addressing identity, love, illness, injustice, faith, abuse and family, and bringing society’s most difficult topics into the light, where conversation and healing are possible.
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