WGBH - Drama RSS

Call the Midwife

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:10 PM +0000

Cynthia is deeply effected when the Nonnatus community is rocked at the death of the Kelly family’s newborn son. The midwife comes under intense scrutiny from the police and the pregnant women of Poplar.

Page Eight

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:29 PM +0000

An aging spy stumbles on an international scandal that could bring down the British government. But will it bring down his own career first?

Downton Abbey: Season Finale

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:58 PM +0000

The Crawleys head to a Scottish hunting lodge, while the downstairs staff stays behind at Downton Abbey. New romances flare up, and a crisis unfolds.

Downton Abbey: Episode 6

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:47 PM +0000

Change arrives in a big way for several key characters at Downton Abbey. A yearly cricket match with the village sees old scores settled and new plots hatched.

Downton Abbey

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:57 PM +0000

Mr. Bates is provoked by his cellmate, while in Downton Abbey, Cora, and Robert are estranged after tragedy strikes, and the servants shun Isobel for helping a prostitute.

More from the English Channel

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:40 AM +0000

Murder in Midsomer

The rural countryside of a fictional county in England provides the backdrop for this crime series based on the novels of Caroline Graham. A lush visual style, quirky characters and ubiquitous red herrings recall classic public television British mysteries of the past. At the center of the Midsomer Murders investigations is detective chief inspector Tom Barnaby, played by actor John Nettles (Bergerac).

In the first two shows, someone decides to turn Midsomer Deverell’s memorial garden into a tea shop, a move that proves to be a fatal mistake for more than one person. DCI Barnaby’s criminal investigation uncovers a tumultuous trail of ruined dreams, scandalous love aff airs and vicious blackmail — all leading straight to the killer.

» Watch a preview and view more airings

Introducing DCI Banks

Stephen Tompkinson and Andrea Lowe star as the tenacious and stubborn chief inspector Alan Banks and the feisty and headstrong detective sergeant Annie Cabbot in DCI Banks, a series of thrilling crime stories based on crime writer Peter Robinson’s novels.

What makes Banks different from other investigators? “He’s very much an ‘everyman’ type of character, which is why so many readers can identify with him,” Robinson writes in The Telegraph. “He’s no super sleuth or hard man, simply a flawed, passionate, occasionally naive and sometimes deeply insightful man.”

Follow DCI Banks and his team in two programs as they discover a serial killer and investigate a houseboat fire that turns out to be more than just a case of arson.

» Watch a preview and view more airings

» More British drama on WGBH 44

Don't forget, if you love British drama consider making a contribution to WGBH, so we can present more new series as they become available.

Lark Rise To Candleford

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:00 PM +0000

Wednesday at 8 on WGBH 44

Downton Abbey: Let the Word Games Begin

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 11:08 AM +0000

Even before Lady Cora's mother arrived from New York, Lady Violet was dishing out American insults. But Mrs. Levinson seems to have brought plenty of sharp retorts in her luggage. Watch Season 3 of Downton Abbey.

Online and on Sundays at 9pm on WGBH 2

Two Leading Men Talk About Downton Abbey

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:13 PM +0000

Masterpiece’s vaunted drama Downton Abbey returns Jan. 6 for its third season. While visiting Boston, cast members Rob James-Collier and Hugh Bonneville talked with Jared Bowen about the show's success.

Downton Abbey Season 3

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:39 PM +0000

Recovering from the family's great loss, Lady Grantham finds joy her new role as a granny. When the Crawleys head to a Scottish hunting lodge, see what new crisis she and the family will have to face.

Sunday at 9pm on WGBH 2

Watch it Again: Downton Abbey Season 2

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:24 PM +0000

The Crawleys host a hunt and everyone gathers at Downton Abbey for the holidays in the finale of Season 2.

Downton Abbey Revisited

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:10 AM +0000

Watch highlights of great moments from Season 1 and Season 2 of Downton Abbey plus interviews and behind-the-scenes peeks that might give you a clue what the Crawley's will face as they enter the Roaring Twenties.

Thursday at 9:30pm on WGBH 2

Downton Abbey Wins Emmy for Original Score

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:50 AM +0000

Hear from the composer of the winner of the 2012 Emmy Award for Original Score for a Series.

On-demand at Classical New England

Case Histories Continues

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:25 AM +0000

Jackson meets a crime novelist caught in a road rage incident while he searches for a drowning victim’s identity.

Sunday on WGBH2

From Masterpiece Mystery: Case Histories

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:16 AM +0000

The first of three engrossing "Case Histories" adapted from the popular Kate Atkinson novels finds Edinburgh, Scotland, private investigator Jackson Brodie looking into a 30-year-old missing-persons case.

Sunday, 9pm on WGBH 2

Inspector Lewis: The Indelible Stain

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:26 AM +0000

Lewis and Hathaway investigate the murder of a visiting American academic who courted controversy with a theory that many critics construed as thinly veiled racism.

Sunday, 9pm on WGBH 2

Kirsten Greenidge and "Luck of the Irish"

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:02 AM +0000

April 24, 2012

Playwright Kirsten Greenidge's latest play, "The Luck of the Irish", is about an upwardly mobile African American family in the 1950s that moves from inner-city Boston to a white part of town.

"Luck of the Irish"(Hungtington Theatre)

BOSTON — In the late 1950s, Lucy and Rex Taylor, a well-to-do African-American couple living in Boston’s South End, aspire to move to a nearby suburb to provide a better life for their two daughters. Unable to purchase a home in a segregated neighborhood themselves, they pay Patty Ann and Joe Donovan, a struggling Irish family to “ghost-buy” the house on their behalf and then sign over the deed. Fifty years later, Lucy’s granddaughter Hannah lives in the house with her family, where she grapples with the contemporary racial and social issues that stem from living in a primarily white community. When Lucy dies and leaves the house to Hannah and her sister Nessa, the now elderly Donovans return and ask for “their” house back.

Though the play is not autobiographical, Greenidge writes what she knows. Her grandparents moved from Boston to Arlington in the '60s. It’s an era that Greenidge captures in her play. In toggling between 1950s and the 21st century, "The Luck of the Irish" explores the timeless themes of race, class, and intergenerational conflict.

The play's director, Melia Bensussen, praises Greenidge's script. "The core, emotional truth sang to me the first time I read this play. It's so honest. There are no villains. There are no heroes. There are human beings trying to make the right choices….It's also about the struggle of being a parent. When you see Hannah in this perfect storm of race, class and modern parenting, she has a wonderful monologue, and I don't know a working mother who has seen the play and not been utterly recognized by Kirsten's writing, no matter race or class, because it outlines the emotional difficulty of what contemporary society asks of all of us. The construction of the Luck of the Irish and the complexity of all these lives revealed to us, without judgment, it's revelatory in this way," she said.

Although the plot would suggest a right and wrong, Greenidge said, "It was really important to me not to vilify anybody. You've got an African-American family and an Irish Catholic family together on stage in Boston, and you've got to do that stuff right."

Jared Bowen's Arts Ahead: Lows and Highs

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:47 PM +0000

April 12, 2012

Will Lyman, Nicholas Dillenburg and Karen MacDonald In Long Day's Journey Into Night. Photo by Andrew Brilliant / Brilliant Pictures.

BOSTON — Theater-goers won't want to miss this long-awaited performance of Eugene O'Neill's powerful examination of family, and families won't want to miss a night of delight under the Big Top.

Long Day's Journey Into Night
At the New Repertory Theatre through April 22nd

Eugene O’Neill's 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, a semi-autobiographical drama, intimately examines the addictions, regrets, and deceits of the tormented Tyrone family. Through the course of a single heart-wrenching day, the members of the family confront one another as their blame, resentment, and animosity explodes.

BULLY
Documentary Film
Opens in theaters this Friday

Directed by Sundance and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, BULLY explores stories that represent a different facet of America’s bullying crisis. The filmmakers follow five kids and families over the course of a school year. Stories include two families who have lost children to suicide and a mother awaiting the fate of her 14-year-old daughter who has been incarcerated after bringing a gun on her school bus. With an intimate glimpse into homes, classrooms, cafeterias and principals’ offices, the film offers insight into the often cruel world of the lives of bullied children.

The film rating for BULLY recently changed from "R" to "PG-13".

US Int'l Clown Hall of Fame inductee Barry Lubin as "Grandma" Photo: Bertrand Guay/ Big Apple Circus

Big Apple Circus: Dream Big
Under the Big Top on City Hall Plaza through May 13

Complete with a juggler, a mechanical doll who comes alive, spirited horses, frolicsome dogs, and a capybara and porcupine to perk up the sawdust party, families will enjoy a new season of acrobatics, comedy and magic. A singing Ringmistress and the Big Apple Circus Band share ringing melodies and Grandma, apogee of comical aspiration and mirthful joy, is back.

The Witches of Lublin

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:03 PM +0000

April 8, 2012

Illustration by Ilene Winn-Lederer

Poor but educated Rivke, along with her two unmarried daughters and a granddaughter, lives in 18th century Lublin, Poland. The women face a quandry when their reputation as the best klezmer musicians in Poland spreads beyond their ghetto's boundaries. The ruling count commands Rivke and her family to perform at his son's celebration, forcing Rivke to make an impossible choice: Do as he commands and risk scandal, or refuse and risk the Count's revenge on the entire Jewish community - a pogrom.

While researching klezmer music history in Eastern Europe, co-writer Yale Strom learned that women also performed, and that when they played for gentile nobility, their reward was sometimes beatings, kidnappings or even death. This history formed the springboard for The Witches of Lublin, a radio drama by Strom, Elizabeth Schwartz and Ellen Kushner based on Jewish women's lives in 18th Century Europe, klezmer music and feminist history, with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in.

Bullying And Gay Teen Experience: Reflections Of A Rock Lobster

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:20 PM +0000

March 5, 2012

Felix Teich as ‘Paul Guilbert’ and Ian Shain as ‘Aaron Fricke’in the Boston Children's Theater production of Rock Lobster.

BOSTON — Everyone from Boston Mayor Tom Menino to actress Susan Sarandon have offered support. But a new Boston Children’s Theatre production about an old controversy is proving to be divisive still. Reflections of a Rock Lobster is a play about a real-life high school teenager who sued to bring his boyfriend to the prom.

Aaron Fricke doesn’t know where the conviction came from when in 1980 he sued his Cumberland, Rhode Island high school to take his boyfriend to the prom. He does know what he felt like—a rock lobster.

“It’s a metaphor I used for growing up gay, which is the idea of an animal a creature with a firm shell for defense but no claws for offense,” Fricke said.

Fricke’s 1980 lawsuit catapulted him into national headlines, especially when he won, thereby creating a precedent still exercised in courtrooms to this day.

“When I found myself speaking to constitutional lawyers and a federal judge telling them what it was like, what the world looked like through the eyes of a gay teenager,” Fricke explained, “I realized I had a lot to say to people and I had a lot that needed to be learned, really. Because the world can be a scary place for gay kids.”

Now 32 years later, Fricke’s book about the experience, Reflections of a Rock Lobster, has been adapted for the stage, with a world premiere by Boston Children’s Theatre. It’s a significant step, says the theater’s Artistic Director Burgess Clark.

“It seems nationally we’ve been getting an enormous amount of attention because we are the first children’s theater in the country to tackle the topics of bullying and the gay teen experience,” Clark said.

Clark, who also wrote and directs the play, has long wanted to adapt Rock Lobster, ever since reading Fricke’s book as a young gay man himself, when he says he couldn’t imagine having Fricke’s courage. So it’s not lost on Clark that an event three decades old is perhaps even more resonant today.

“I think it’s shocking in a different way,” Clark said. “I think the rash in teen suicides and things that have plagued the gay community. I don’t think it’s necessarily easier being a gay teen these days.”

Or even to show them. Rock Lobster presents the six-months leading up to Fricke’s prom, when he was bullied and literally pummeled by his peers. Clark says a number of administrators have declined to send students to the production. It’s true for star Ian Shaine’s own private school.

“Some of my teachers will be coming to opening night and some of my friends but the greater school wont’ be coming,” Shaine said. “I mean, they have their reasons.”

Beyond illustrating Fricke’s civil suit, the play plumbs the gay teen experience. There are dates, conversations about relationships and sex. Shaine, who plays Fricke, wants audiences to realize it’s simply every day life.

“There is very little difference between same sex relationships and heterosexual relationships. That everyone is human and we have human feelings like love that everyone shares together,” he said.

That sometimes can result in a happily ever after, as was the case with Aaron Fricke and his decidedly uneventful prom.

“The reason why the school administration said they weren’t going to allow us to go was they put it all on the kids. They said it was going to cause a riot. The kids were going to rise up and incite violence,” Fricke explained. “In fact, the kids showed them that it was not at what they planned. They had a good time with us, some of them shook our hands and said congratulations. Others just went off and had a good time on their own.”

Reflections of a Rock Lobster plays at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston’s South End through this Sunday.