HOW TO GROW BEANS . . . AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Raven Theatre
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This is the Thoreau Tom Drummer plays in Allan Bates’s excellent one-man show How to Grow Beans . . . and Other Considerations: literate, witty, opinionated, bubbling over with heartfelt convictions, but totally uninterested in collecting disciples. “This is how I grow beans,” he explains at the beginning of the show. “You will no doubt decide for yourself how to grow your own beans.”
In the wrong hands this could degenerate into little more than a glorified teaching aid, a field trip that thinks it’s an evening at the theater. Happily Bates, a retired teacher, never allows How to Grow Beans to become flaccid or merely educational. Though the play has very little action, Thoreau’s intellectual journey alone would be enough to keep us interested.
It would take more than a cast full of gifted comic actors to save Prop Theatre’s late-night fiasco The Pot Show, created through improvisation and based on the preposterous premise that eight people–four against the legalization of marijuana, four for it–would be willing to join together in a traveling debate show moderated by a quick-talking opportunist. The result takes forever to get started–we see every member of the panel interviewed–and even longer to end.
