Published October 14, 2018 in The Santa Barbara Independent
Thursday, September 13, 2018
by CHARLES DONELAN
Lit Moon Theater Company has certainly given its actors plenty to do this season. All six of the players in the company’s production of A Doll House — Paige Tautz, Matthew Tavianini, Victoria Finlayson, Stanley Hoffman, Brian Harwell, and Nina Sallinen – are also in Julius Caesar, which ran on alternate nights during this recent engagement, and, on Saturday, September 1, occupied the matinee slot with A Doll House playing in the evening. Going from Shakespeare to Ibsen in a single day is a remarkable feat, and doing so this well is nothing short of heroic; the cast deserves wide recognition for their extreme dedication to this challenging work.
Now in its 26th year of operation, Lit Moon embodies an approach and an aesthetic that is at once homegrown and international, DIY and strikingly postmodern. Cultivated over decades of practice both here in Santa Barbara and at festivals and state theaters across Europe and Asia, director John Blondell’s joyous and freewheeling visual style encompasses many moods and tempos, from tiny sounds and gestures at the edges of perception to frenetic crescendos of wild movement and hoarse cries that go beyond language.
