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Theatre in Review: Katie Roche (Mint Theatre)

The more we see of Teresa Deevy, the more she impresses. A leading light of the Abbey Theatre in the 1930s, she sank into obscurity, all but disappearing from the history books until Jonathan Bank, artistic director of the ...

Theatre in Review: Donnybrook! (Irish Repertory Theatre)

For nearly a decade, Irish Repertory Theatre has been producing vest-pocket productions of vintage musicals with mixed results; presented on the company's tiny stage, with tiny casts and even tinier bands, the results have been not unlike ...

Theatre in Review: This Clement World (St. Ann's Warehouse)

Inclement weather prevented me from seeing Cynthia Hopkins' new show before it opened, an irony that would not be lost on her, since, by her own account, she has turned away from creating performances about her personal demons -- ...

Theatre in Review: All in the Timing (Primary Stages/59E59)

The timing couldn't be more right for another look at David Ives' popular collection of comic sketches; the winter blahs are no match for this magisterial exercise in carefully controlled lunacy. Ives is a specialist at taking a ...

Theatre in Review: Clive (The New Group)

Clive is billed as being "based on/inspired by/stolen from" Bertolt Brecht's Baal, and, like many such acts of homage, it remains trapped in the shadow of its source material. Written when Brecht was 20, long ...

Theatre in Review: Good Person of Szechwan (The Foundry Theatre/La MaMa E.T.C.)

"Without danger, there is no theatre." So says Lettice Douffet, the eccentric Englishwoman so memorably portrayed by Maggie Smith in Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage. These were strange words to be recalling at a Brecht revival -- ...

Theatre in Review: The Vandal (The Flea Theatre)

We can now call Hamish Linklater a man of many parts. He long ago proved himself as a skilled high comedy technician in works as varied as Twelfth Night, The School for Lies, and Seminar. (He also demonstrated his neat ...

Theatre in Review: The Man Under (Athena Theatre/59E59)

You're on your first date, and the young lady's idea of a good time is to roam through the tunnels of New York's subway system. For extra fun, she likes to lie down on the tracks, experiencing the thrill of the cars rushing above her. She ...

Theatre in Review: All the Rage (Peter Jay Sharp Theater)

One quality our theatre could use more of these days is thoughtfulness. There's no absence of big-idea men: We have Tom Stoppard, who offers an argument only to find 16 different ways of contradicting it, and Tony Kushner, who erects large ...

Theatre in Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Rodgers Theatre)

The occasionally gripping, yet thoroughly unnecessary, revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a first-class example of the pickle that Broadway finds itself in these days. This is the third revival of Tennessee Williams' ...

Theatre in Review: Picnic (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)

"Mind if I start a fire?" So asks Hal Carter, the hunky young drifter who has stopped in a hot Kansas town long enough to set off a conflagration of aroused passions among the women assembled in a communal backyard on a steamy Labor Day. ...

Theatre in Review: The Future is Not What it Was (Kindling Theatre Company/Walkerspace)

The new production at Walkerspace is a classic good-news/bad-news situation, so let's get the dreary part out of the way first.The Future is Not What it Was is thoroughly derivative, overlong by nearly an hour, and contains ...

Theatre in Review: Life and Times: Episodes 1-4 (Public Theater)

Life and Times: Episodes 1-4 is a Dadaist oratorio based on a series of telephone calls. It runs ten hours.
Is the room empty yet? No? All right, I'll continue. A production of the New York-based Nature Theatre of ...

Theatre in Review: Midsummer [A Play with Songs] (Theatre Row)

Not too far into Midsummer [A Play with Songs] the characters imagine the Hollywood version of their story, all jacked up with clichés. There is even a brief discussion of whether Hugh Jackman or Russell Crowe would make the better ...

Theatre in Review: In Acting Shakespeare (Pearl Theatre Company)

It has happened to everyone who works in the theatre, and to anyone who simply loves it: that moment when a performance shakes you to the core, leaving you changed forever. For James DeVita, it happened in 1984, when he saw Ian ...

Theatre in Review: Zero Cost House (Public Theatre/Under the Radar Festival)

It's a truism that in the theatre -- in all art, really -- the best work is personal. Only hacks worry over what the audience wants before the work of writing begins. The rule isn't so much write what you know, but write about what ...

Theatre in Review: Blood Play (Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival)

"Never mix, never worry." The characters in Blood Play would do well to heed this maxim, offered unforgettably by Honey, the soused academic wife in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Such a warning would probably fall on deaf ...

Theatre in Review: Water by the Spoonful (Second Stage Theatre)

Quiara Alegría Hudes provides drama by the bushelful in Water by the Spoonful, even if she doesn't quite know what to do with it. Leading the play's parade of troubled souls is Yaz, who at 31 is beset by a litany of ...

Theatre in Review: Golden Age (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center)

Art is long; life is short -- a statement that is one of the cornerstones of Terrence McNally's remarkable body of work. (The playwright would probably add that life is complicated, often violent, usually frustrating, and ...

Theatre in Review: The Great God Pan (Playwrights Horizons)

The Great God Pan begins with a meeting between Jamie and Frank, childhood playmates who haven't seen each other in a quarter of a century. (They are now 32.) To say the least, they make a study in contrasts. Jamie, a ...