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Lydia R. Diamond’s “Smart People,” a hard-edged satire of life among the academic multiculturati, was first performed off Broadway in 2016 in a production directed by Kenny Leon. I praised the play at the time as “intelligent and provocative enough to put you in mind of Tom Stoppard,” and I wasn’t even slightly surprised to see it taken up in short order by regional theaters. A four-character play with minimal scenic requirements, it also lends itself to small-scale bare-bones production, which makes it ideally suited to webcasting. Accordingly, Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, America’s finest classical theater festival, has now put “Smart People” online as part of the company’s “Out of the Woods” series of Zoom-based play readings….
Directed by Melisa Pereyra, this webcast, like its predecessors in the “Out of the Woods” series, is an unstaged Zoom reading. It is well acted, crisply paced and sufficiently convincing in its own right to confirm my initially favorable impression of “Smart People,” and if you’ve never seen the play, I recommend it to you….
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Read the whole thing here.An excerpt from Writers Theatre’s staging of Smart People: