Like many people, I'd heard of the Belarus Free Theatre twice before the Under the Radar Festival. The first time was when they performed Being Harold Pinter - a mash-up of Pinter plays and speeches - at a conference last April.

The second time was this:

Fewer than three weeks after a meeting with former Czech President Václav Havel on August 4, 2007, at his country cottage in the Czech Republic on August 22, 2007, during the Free Theatre's première of Edward Bond's theatrical piece Eleven Vests, special forces from the Belarusian police stormed the performance by the Belarus Free Theatre in a private apartment in Minsk, and "Actors, directors, and audience members," including its director Khalezin, were arrested, though subsequently released.

The theatre's founder Nikolai Khalezin is still pretty shaken up, having stated, "Police used to burst into our performances with machine guns but they disappeared just as fast. A mass arrest like this is a first."

In short, definitely.

Hello everyone it's good to be here, thanks for coming.

We're having a great time in New York. Just being here always puts me in a better general mood. (Until it's 1am and we're riding the train with a boatload of moaning homeless people and I feel guilty about getting a new jacket. But that's another story.)

The Suicide Kings - In Spite of Everything

This was a good show and I'm glad I saw it.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, I know. But I really did like it. Read on.

Last year and this, I have found that a lot of the work at Under the Radar leaves me firmly between two poles of opinion. Often, I find a few things to love about it, a few things that are really original and exciting, and a bunch of things that bugged the heck out of me. Often, those things have to do with direction, or at least that's my perspective. My wife and I have the theory that actors bug here because she's an actor, and the directing bugs me because I'm a director. Really though, I imagine that if you're a writer/performer with a vision, it must be difficult to find just the right director to bring your work to fruition.

Anyway.

Okay, so this won't be so much a review as it'll be a slathering of praise.

A photo from the Cynthia Hopkins/Accinosco production Must Don't Whip 'Um has been on the cover of the Wexner Center's programs all season, so I guess it's fair to say I had some high expectations for this show. I skipped it at The Public's Under the Radar festival, knowing I could see it here. I'm kind of regretting it now. I'm going to be out of town performing in my own show, so there's no chance I can catch it again.

The show started with a voice-over from the Narrator, assumedly Cynthia Hopkins, explaining, essentially, what we were about to see, the farewell concert of her mother's music career, an event that took place shortly before her mother's disappearance. There was some milling about on stage and a couple of scenes acted with the aid of some clever blue screen before Cynthia Hopkins appeared, the music started and I began to cry.