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  Theatre in Review: Urge for Going (The Public Theater)
In the most gripping and lyrical sequence in Mona Mansour's new drama, Adham, a Palestinian literature scholar, recalls the day in 1967 when he gave a lecture in London on William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. He had been ...
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Theatre in Review: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Richard Rodgers Theater)
"This place is lousy with ghosts," remarks the title character in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The place he's talking about is Baghdad in 2003, in the months following Operation Iraqi Freedom. The comment turns out to be ...
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Theatre in Review: Born Bad (Soho Rep)
In all good writing, God is in the details, right? If you're telling a story, it only improves by being made more concrete, correct? Even the mysterious universes of Beckett and Pinter have their distinctive features; we may not fully ...
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Theatre in Review: The Other Place (MCC/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Laurie Metcalf is one of the theatre's great quick-change artists, and it's a talent that has nothing to do with her costumes. Instead, her genius lies in how, with stunning economy, she picks the essential dramatic tension out of ...
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Theatre in Review: Benefactors (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
No good deed goes unpunished; that's the moral of Michael Frayn's Benefactors, a tense, compact drama that begins as the tale of a soured friendship and ends up asking some very knotty questions about the impulse to do good ...
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Theatre in Review: Marie and Bruce (The New Group/Theatre Row)
In the first few minutes of Wallace Shawn's play, Marie calls her husband, Bruce, "a damned cheap, God-damned idiot pig," a "God-damned f---ing incredible pig," and a God-damned filthy c---s---ing turd." When he asks for his ...
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Theatre in Review: The Book of Mormon (Eugene O'Neill Theatre)
When I was a boy, the nuns who taught me were fond of saying that God writes straight with crooked lines. I finally understand what they meant - how else to explain how a pair of atheist cutups have come up with a sophisticated analysis ...
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Theatre in Review: My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (Barrow Street Theatre)
Mike Birbiglia is never such good company as when he wanders off topic. My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, like his earlier piece, Sleepwalk With Me, has a definite throughline -- if only he could stick to it. The ...
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Theatre in Review: Between Worlds (New World Stages
New genre alert: Between Worlds is billed as a "flamenco fantasia." Siudy, the show's one-named star and choreographer, has teamed up with Pablo Croce -- who, according to the program notes, has directed more ...
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Theatre in Review: Ghetto Klown (Lyceum Theatre)
In 1998, when I saw Freak, I remarked to my companion, "John Leguizamo is a very funny man -- and I hope his parents are dead." I wasn't being malicious; Freak, the first of Leguizamo's one-man rants to hit Broadway, ...
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Theatre in Review: Arcadia (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
Tom Stoppard must be the most respected and least loved of modern playwrights. Consider the notices for David Leveaux's revival of Arcadia, which got the most lukewarm set of positive notices in many a season, ...
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Theatre in Review: Three Men on a Horse (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
God love James Murtagh. He barges on stage late in the action of Three Men on a Horse and wakes up a sleeping production with a pure jolt of comic adrenaline. He plays Mr. Carver, an irascible, superannuated greeting ...
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Theatre in Review: Double Falsehood (Classic Stage Company)
The difficult thing about Double Falsehood is that the play is nowhere near as interesting as its rather squirrelly provenance. To wit: William Shakespeare wrote a number of plays in collaboration with John ...
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Theatre in Review: Kin (Playwrights Horizons)
Kin focuses on the long-term romantic relationship of a couple named Anna and Sean -- but, except for a brief and minor encounter at the halfway point, we never see them together until nearly the end of Bathsheba Doran's ...
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Theatre in Review: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Palace Theatre)
When they work at all, jukebox musicals function less as works of narrative and more as parties. Usually outfitted with the feeblest of librettos, they prefer to coast on their playlists of golden oldies, which tend to be enough to get ...
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Theatre in Review: Hello Again (Transport Group)
Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde has been adapted endlessly, on stage and in film, but surely there is no more haunting version of it than Hello Again. Schnitzler conceived a sexual roundelay of interlinked lovers as a ...
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Theatre in Review: Spy Garbo (Affinity Company Theatre/3-Legged Dog)
Joan Pujol Garcia is surely the most fascinating historical figure that you've never heard of. Operating under the code name Garbo during World War II, the Spanish spy seduced his masters with a fantastic array of manufactured data, ...
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Theatre in Review: Cactus Flower (Westside Arts Theatre)
Do you remember sex comedy? If so, you're showing your age. Between, say, The Moon is Blue, in 1951, and Last of the Red Hot Lovers, in 1970, no season went by without half a dozen or more such examples of this now-defunct ...
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Theatre in Review: Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop)
"Are we quite done with the hugging and the learning?" This question is posed near the end of Peter and the Starcatcher; it's meant as a gag line, but it goes right to the heart of the identity crisis plaguing the new ...
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Theatre in Review: Good People (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
David Lindsay-Abaire has turned out to be one of the theatre's most intriguing multiple personalities. Establishing himself as the author of quirky comedies such as Fuddy Meers and Wonder of the World, he then threw ...
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