Cincinnati’s fall theater season is in full swing. Here are excerpts from my reviews of three productions at Know Theatre, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and Falcon Theatre.
Photo by Mikki Schaffner
MAKE BELIEVE
Know Theatre of Cincinnati’s artistic director, Bridget Leak, landed a plum offering with Bess Wohl’s Make Believe, and she has personally staged a bravado production to kickstart the scrappy Over-the-Rhine theatre company’s 2026-2027 season. Wohl, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Liberation, has written an intriguing, 80-minute script about family dynamics and how parents shape their children’s lives.
Make Believe is not an easy play to bring to life. Its first half is a collection of scenes depicting the four kids of the Conlee family sometime in the 1980s. They are hanging out in a steep-roofed attic playroom (designed by Samantha Reno and evocatively lit by Marly Wooster) littered with toys, soccer balls, a computer game console, strings of colored holiday lights, costumes, and a makeshift fort draped with sheets and a quilt (Drew Homan is the properties designer).
Leak has shaped believable performances with four age-appropriate young actors who spend some of their time role-playing a “make believe” family.
READ MY FULL REVIEW: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy613.html
Photo by Phil Armstrong
NETWORK
As its name implies, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company is focused on producing works by the great playwright. But they don’t stop there: Plays with exceptional writing by other writers that have demonstrated lasting qualities are now routinely included in the company’s annual offerings. Its upcoming season has kicked off with Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of the classic 1976 film, Network, which earned a 1977 Academy Award for Best Screenplay for writer Paddy Chayefsky. Playwright Hall claims that almost every word of his adaptation is actually Chayefsky’s. And they are persuasive, foreboding words, startlingly timely a half-century later.
The Cincy Shakes production, staged by Artistic Director Brian Isaac Phillips, maintains the frantic, frenetic pace of the movie’s TV newsroom and the programs produced there. Multiple screens display the UBS network test pattern logo and take us to and from the story’s cinematic moments.
READ MY FULL REVIEW: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy614.html
Photo by Claudia Hershner
EUREKA DAY
At Eureka Day, a progressive private school in Berkeley, California, a politically correct, left-leaning executive committee is discussing a menu on its website where applicants can express their ethnicity, theoretically enabling the school to be open to and attract a broad-based, diverse student body. The troublesome entry under consideration is “Transracial Adoptee.” Differing opinions are expressed, and Don, the idealistic head of school, reminds his four colleagues that the school’s bylaws require full consensus to implement policies.
It’s the opening of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, the 2025 Tony Award-winning play currently onstage at the intimate Falcon Theatre in Newport, Kentucky. The committee’s conversation is full of “woke” statements that belie numerous microaggressions that fester just beneath the surface. They set aside the controversial term, deeming it not an ethnicity.
READ MY FULL REVIEW: https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/cincy/cincy615.html