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  Theatre in Review: No Place to Go (Joe's Pub)
You think you have job troubles? At the beginning of No Place to Go, Ethan Lipton announces that the company that has employed him for the better part of ten years is relocating -- to Mars. It's purely an economic decision, ...
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Theatre in Review: Flight (DR2 Theatre)
In Flight, Michel Wallerstein takes two hot-button issues -- Alzheimer's disease and the Holocaust -- and subjects them to dismayingly ham-handed treatment. There's a fascinating story inside this material, but it ...
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Theatre in Review: The Maids (Red Bull Theatre at Theatre at St. Clement's)
To drag or not to drag? That is the question. Jean Genet intended that the three females who make up the cast of The Maids be played by men. Louis Jouvet, his director, balked, and the 1947 premiere featured a trio of ...
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Theatre in Review: Tribes (Barrow Street Theatre)
Nina Raine is far better known in London than New York, although I suspect that is about to change, for she has one of the greatest gifts a playwright can have: She can take what looks like a familiar situation and, through the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Lady from Dubuque (Pershing Square Theatre Center)
How did we ever get Edward Albee so wrong? His status as one of our greatest living playwrights is now so secure that it's easy to forget how, not so long ago, he was written off as written out. Such early-'80s works as Lolita
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Theatre in Review: Hurt Village (Pershing Square Signature Center)
The worst thing you can do with a young playwright is rush to judgment. Consider the case of Katori Hall; after she made her Broadway debut last fall with The Mountaintop, a rather too whimsical fantasy about Martin Luther ...
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Theatre in Review: An Iliad (New York Theatre Workshop)
The old saw, that all you need for great theatre is an actor and some powerful words, barely even gets lip service nowadays, addicted as we are to hydraulic lifts, flying rigs, and vast LED walls. But the truth of it is brought home with ...
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Theatre in Review: Painting Churches (Keen Company at Theatre Row)
Is there a more fraught relationship than that of parent and child? Most American playwrights would have it so, given the onslaught of family dramas that open each season. (Years ago, when I read plays for a theatre company, I was ...
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Theatre in Review: Beyond the Horizon (Irish Repertory Theatre)
The word on Eugene O'Neill is that his early plays -- really, the first 30 years or so of his career -- consist largely of unproduceable one-acts and arty experiments in the expressionistic spirit of the times, and it's his twilight ...
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Theatre in Review: Assistance (Playwrights Horizons)
"Working for Daniel is like living the last 30 minutes of Goodfellas over and over again." So says one of the office slaves who make up the cast of Assistance. We never see Daniel Weisinger, nor do we ever learn just ...
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Theatre in Review: Rutherford & Son (Mint Theatre)
"There's not a scrap of love in the whole house," comments one of the bitterly unhappy members of a Northern England industrial dynasty in Rutherford & Son. The play's title is also the name of the business -- a glass factory ...
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Theatre in Review: Galileo (Classic Stage Company)
Timing is everything; sometimes, a show lands at just the right moment. In the last couple of weeks, we've had the American Catholic bishops sparring with the Obama Administration over contraception. And we've had Rick Santorum, so ...
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Theatre in Review: Call Me Waldo (Working Theatre at June Havoc Theatre)
A romantic comedy about transcendentalism? That's a new one. Don't misunderstand me: If you attend Call Me Waldo, you won't see Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson having a catfight over Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, nor can ...
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Theatre in Review: Blood Knot (Signature Theatre)
It's a funny thing about Athol Fugard. You'd think that his earlier plays, most of which deal head-on with the evils of South Africa's apartheid system, might seem a little dated, especially when measured against his later, more ...
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Theatre in Review: CQ/CX (Atlantic Theatre at the Peter Norton Space)
One of the most sizzling journalistic scandals of recent times is brought to life in CQ/CX. Gabe McKinley, a former reporter for The New York Times, takes on the case of Jayson Blair, the gifted young reporter ...
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Theatre in Review: A Map of Virtue (13P/Fourth Street Theatre)
Erin Courtney certainly packs plenty into the 70-minute running time of A Map of Virtue. There are strange coincidences, surprise meetings, complex back stories, and a brutal act of vandalism. For the first third, the ...
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Theatre in Review: Myths and Hymns (Prospect Theatre Company)
The bad news is, ever since winning his Tony for The Light in the Piazza, Adam Guettel has sadly been MIA. In a recent interview, he indicated that he had been working on a musical based on The Princess Bride, a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G (Ma-Yi Theatre/Vampire Cowboys/Theatre Row)
I know that we live in the era of all things meta, but there's got to be a limit. Consider the case of The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G. Ostensibly the intrigue-filled tale of Hung, a Vietnamese-American man who returns ...
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Theatre in Review: How I Learned to Drive (Second Stage)
Even in the current revival-happy climate, in which plays from the mid to late 1990s are seen as fair game for a second look, it's not easy to justify a new production of How I Learned to Drive. The original opened as ...
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Theatre in Review: Tokio Confidential (Atlantic Stage Two)
Conviction may be the most underrated of theatrical values. As masters from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Stephen Sondheim - all of whom have built stories around cannibalism, for example - could confirm, it's not just the story you ...
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