Romanska’s Online Show “The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking” Reviewed by NewYorkTheater.me

Performing Arts associate professor Magda Romanska’s short online show, “The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking,” was recently shown at the Reverb Festival at Roundabout Theatre, which is a virtual festival presenting 24 theater pieces, all created by artists with disabilities. The show received a positive review from a New York theater blog.

Then there are the entries in the festival that are clearly excerpts of longer works on which the artist has been working for a while.  Among these that I’d most like to see further developed are  Magda Romanska’s “The Life and Times of Stephen Hawking,” a complex and eerily magnetic offering that includes scenes of cryptic dialogue between A.A. Brenner and Gregg Mozgala as Hawking and Mephistopheles in front of an enlarged black and white chessboard that seems deliberate homage to early Ingmar Bergman, and another scene of silhouettes of people in wheelchairs being pushed in front of a backdrop of Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, with a woman repeating the upbeat sentences that people with disabilities hear all the time —  “You’re such an inspiration” —   rending it with so many obnoxious variations that it becomes both comic and pointed.

Read the review. The show can be viewed via Vimeo.