Two (striped) gents

Actors of the same stripe: Johnny and Bruno  Photo: Stratton McCrady Photography

From a dog lover’s – and an actor lover’s – perspective, I’m not sure it gets much cuter than this: John Kuntz (as Launce) and co-star Bruno (as Crab) in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, which opened last night.

Alumni news, in brief:

John Shea’s Junkie, produced by Argos Productions, opens this Thursday, August 25, right here at BPT…

Ginger Lazarus’ The Embyos will be part of Rhombus Playwrights’ fall reading series, at BPT in September…

The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarías opens at D.C.’s Arena Stage in October…

Michael Chernus has joined the cast of Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space, which opens at Manhattan Theatre Club in December…

K. Alexa Mavromatis’ ten-minute play ‘Jinxed’ (a 2011 Heideman Award finalist) will be included in the forthcoming Smith & Kraus anthology 2012: The Best 10-Minute Plays…

Steve Barkhimer on the Adventurous Life

Steve Barkhimer

Revered Boston actor (currently appearing with fellow BPT alum Richard Snee in Alan Ayckbourn's Living Together at Gloucester Stage), director and alumni playwright Steven Barkhimer talks to us amid a hundred projects. We caught up with him on email. 

What are you working on now?
I’ve been enlisted to help create a set of shows, three of which previewed as workshop productions in April and May 2011. Ben Evett, who started the Actors Shakespeare Project, had an idea for a theatre event, a sort of mini-series, which would be neither a fixture like Shear Madness nor simply an open-ended soap-opera. The hope, of course, is to have a number of shows, each of which stands independently and is satisfying in itself, but would spark an interest in seeing the whole series.

I’m working, incrementally, on writing and re-writing several other plays, including one for which the Massachusetts Cultural Council kindly granted me an Artist Fellowship Award. That one is fancifully autobiographical; among the others are a historical drama in verse and song, one is more brooding American-mythic, another is science-as-performance-piece; another is an adaptation of ancient classic from India -- I'll spend six weeks of my summer in India, in fact, trying to enlist some reliable assistance on that.

I’m slated to appear in, and provide music for, a production of Twelfth Night for the Actors Shakespeare Project this fall and will direct The Merry Wives of Windsor for them in the winter. Very exciting.