Openings We're Tracking This Week, January 7-13, 2013

Megan Follows (photo by Robert Popkin)

One of the plays that got Arthur Miller targeted as a Red was, for all intents and purposes, a family drama. But within that drama, Miller also discussed what Eisenhower would later come to call "the military industrial complex" and the rot the war machine set into everything that was once called American Values. All My Sons fell into the shadows of Miller's greatest work, Death of a Salesman, but any production of it is not a case of nostalgia: the play resonates now more powerfully than ever. (Ottawa)

The gem that is The Penelopiad returns for another run. Margaret Atwood's haunting work is given a magnificent production by Nightwood Theatre, a cast headed by Megan Follows, and a director who knows precisely what is required for a strange, haunting piece about power, men, women and the whole damn thing. (Read director Kelly Thornton's notes on mounting the show.) (Toronto)

What can you say about Gone With The Wind? It's big, yes. It poses hard questions about the value of land vs. the value of life, liberty and happiness, yes. Margaret Mitchell's novel was a thrill-a-minute juggernaut that became the biggest hit in the history of cinema. Everyone knows it...or do they? In a production, now - "Post-Racism" - new questions arise, old ones are cast in a new light. (Read director Steven Schipper's notes on creating the production.) (Winnipeg)