|
  Theatre in Review: Conversations with Mother (Theatre 555)
If it's 1984 and you're tending bar at a gay bar called The Meat Hook and your mother calls you at work, it's safe to say you have a problem. So it is with Bobby, the male lead in Matthew Lombardo's new play, locked in an invasive, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Exiles (The MAP Theatre at ART/New York Theatres)
We can all agree, I think, that James Joyce was not natively a playwright, and not just because Exiles, his only dramatic work, languished for decades after it was first published in 1918. (It was rejected by the Abbey ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Dakar 2000 (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
Dakar 2000 is populated by two of the nicest, most likable people you wouldn't trust with a paper clip, let alone your life, and the considerable fun of Rajiv Joseph's new thriller involves trying to figure out what, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: On the Evolutionary Function... (Second Stage, Pershing Square Signature Center)
The title of D. A. Mindell's play, On the Evolutionary Function of Shame, is an act of misdirection; shame is the least of it. The real problem eating at everyone here is the pursuit of knowledge that comes with ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Curse of the Starving Class (The New Group at Pershing Square Signature Center)
In a play called Curse of the Starving Class, someone would display some hunger, no? Sadly, it's the critical element missing from Scott Elliott's production of Sam Shepard's bleak, black comedy. Shepard's ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Grangeville (Signature Theatre Company)
Samuel D. Hunter has mastered the art of theatrical double vision. Beginning in close-up, Grangeville is often as intimate as a whisper yet, zooming out, it reveals an America in terrible disarray. The playwright's ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Redwood (Nederlander Theatre)
Broadway gets its Cinerama moment with Redwood, thanks to its remarkably immersive scenic and video design. Jason Ardizzone-West wraps the action in a forest of screens that extends beyond one's angle of vision, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Safe House (Abbey Theatre/St. Ann's Warehouse)
In the theatre, time can be divided into nanoseconds, each crucial to a play's success; if it overstays its welcome, the result can be unintended agony. Such thoughts occupied me when checking out the new attraction, presented in ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Garside's Career (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)
Jonathan Bank, artistic director of the Mint -- or, as I like to think of him, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Plays -- has stated innumerable times that he doesn't dig up forgotten works just for the archaeological sport of it. Indeed, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Liberation (Roundabout Theatre Company)
Liberation asks the question: From where we started, how did we end up where we are today? For playwright Bess Wohl, the starting point is circa 1970, when a young woman named Lizzie starts a women's rap group in her ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: My First Ex-Husband (MMAC Theatre)
This is the season of Ring Binder Theatre, with rotating casts reading from scripts rather than learning lines and blocking. It's an easy way of getting big-name actors to make short-term commitments, bringing in fresh cadres of fans every ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice (The Tent/ART New York Theatres)
How Is It That We Live... (full title above) is a play at odds with itself. It is ostensibly about the lifelong relationship of the title characters. But the playwright, Len Jenkin, has trouble keeping his mind on that ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Henry IV (Theatre for a New Audience)
In William Shakespeare's history cycle, it's never good to be king; one is surrounded by scheming factions, domestic problems fester in the background, and war is an ever-present threat. The title character of the two-part Henr ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Antiquities (Playwrights Horizons/Vineyard Theatre/Goodman Theatre)
The Antiquities is an exhibition disguised as a play and Jordan Harrison, its author, is our docent, showing us the last few remaining scraps of a lost civilization. That would be humanity as we know it, which, in the ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Beckett Briefs (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Samuel Beckett's career consisted of one long distillation. His breakthrough piece, Waiting for Godot, typically runs two and a half hours; his penultimate work, Catastrophe, clocks in at six minutes. This several ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: A Knock on the Roof (New York Theatre Workshop)
The title of Khawla Ibraheem's play refers to a specific tactic used by the Israeli Army in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As Mariam, the protagonist, notes, "It's a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: English (Roundabout Theatre Company/Todd Haimes Theatre)
Language is a bridge and a barrier in English, Sanaz Toossi's melancholy comedy making its Broadway debut following its initial engagement at Atlantic Theater Company in 2022. It's an outlier among Pulitzer Prize ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Kowalski (The Duke on 42nd Street)
Kowalski is about the unkindness of strangers, in this case, Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, whose original meet-up, at least in this telling, was mighty unseemly. On a summer night in 1947, Brando drops into Williams' ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Peregrinations (Dutch Kills Theatre/Long Story Short at The Tank)
The members of Long Story Short, a self-termed "devising ensemble," couldn't have picked a more apt time for Peregrinations, which examines the five-alarm emergency that immigration has become in this country. According to ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Cymbeline (NAATCO/Lynn F. Angelson Theatre)
Oddly, Stephen Brown-Fried's staging of William Shakespeare's nuttiest play is at its best when soft goods are involved. Very early on, members of the company remove large swaths of fabric from the elaborate iron bed at ...
|
