|
  Theatre in Review: Timon of Athens (The Public Theater)
Sometimes I think Shakespeare's problem plays aren't so problematic after all. Take Measure for Measure: For decades, if not centuries, it was dismissed as a tangle of ill-fitting plot developments -- until the culture wars of the ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)
Having spent nearly five hours in one day taking in The Hallway Trilogy, I can say with total confidence that it is a trilogy about... a hallway. I'd like to be more specific, but I'm at a loss. The program notes suggest ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Invasion! (The Play Company at Walkerspace)
When you're in the hands of totally confident, committed theatre artists -- well, there's nothing like it. Invasion! begins with a stunning coup de théâtre -- on pain of death, I wouldn't reveal the details -- that, at the performance I ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Small Craft Warnings (Mother of Invention/Theatre Row)
It's going to be a good year for Tennessee Williams completists. This is the playwright's centennial, and already three of his lesser-known works -- by which I mean flops - are on the boards in New York. The Roundabout has < ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: A World Apart (Creation Production Company at the Flea Theatre)
A nun and a priest teeter on the edge of a forbidden love in A World Apart, a work that is distinguished by its utter lack of reality. Alarm bells start ringing about two minutes into Susan Mosakowski's new drama, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Compulsion (The Public Theatre)
In Compulsion, Rinne Groff takes one of the juiciest cultural imbroglios of the 20th century -- namely the controversy surrounding the US publication, and stage adaptation, of The Diary of Anne Frank. It's a gripping ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: A Perfect Future (Cherry Lane Theatre)
The title may be A Perfect Future,, but David Hay's new play is a throwback to those days when Edward Albee was all the rage, and everyone and his brother wrote plays about social events where the boozed-up guests ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Whipping Man (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center)
It's always a pleasure to meet a new playwright with a real gift for narrative, and, based on the evidence of The Whipping Man, Matthew Lopez has it in spades. From the minute the lights come up on a ruined, rainswept ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Black Tie (Primary Stages/59E59)
For someone whose great subject is the decline and fall of an entire way of life, A. R. Gurney has provided us with steady amusement for the better part of three decades. He shows no sign of flagging invention in Black Tie
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Gruesome Playground Injuries (Second Stage)
Gruesome Playground Injuries is a nearly perfect title: Like Rajiv Joseph's play, it's original, unsettling, and more than a little off-putting. Apparently gripped by the desire to subvert the two-character romance ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Three Sisters (Classic Stage Company)
A friend of mine often remarks it is God's mercy that there has never been a perfect production of Three Sisters. He says that Anton Chekhov's vision is so powerful, his character insights so penetrating, that, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Road to Qatar! (York Theatre Company)
The Road to Qatar! has an irresistible comic premise: Two struggling musical theatre writers are hired to create a 90-minute tuner for the opening of a soccer stadium in the title country. (Astonishingly, it's a true story, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: What the Public Wants (Mint Theatre)
There are exactly two scenes that really crackle in Arnold Bennett's 1909 drama What the Public Wants, and both of them involve Rob Breckenridge and Ellen Adair. He is Sir Charles Worgan, kingpin of a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The New York Idea (Atlantic Theatre/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
The emergence of the New Woman and the mania for divorce rocks New York society in David Auburn's gloss on Langdon Mitchell's 1906 comedy. Originally a vehicle for Mrs. Fiske, one of the era's great leading ladies -- her ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Other Desert Cities (Lincoln Center Theatre/Mitzi Newhouse Theatre)
"The time to make up your mind about people is never," wrote Philip Barry. They're words that Jon Robin Baitz has seemingly taken to heart in Other Desert Cities, and the result is, far and away, his best play in ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Importance of Being Earnest (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines)
You rarely get universal agreement among the members of the Broadway press, but last week's reviews for the Roundabout revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest constituted one big love letter to Bri ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Flipzoids (Ma-Yi Theatre Company)
Flipzoids is basically a play about an old lady on a beach, and it's our good fortune that she's played by Ching Valdes-Aran. As Aying, an aging Filipino woman who has been unwillingly brought to Southern California ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Honey Brown Eyes (Working Theatre/Theatre Row)
Following the murders in Arizona last week, there's been so much talk about the breakdown of civility in America that it's easy to forget how good we have it. Consider Honey Brown Eyes, in which the playwright Stefanie ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Carnival Round the Central Figure (IRT Theatre)
The Central Figure of the title of Diana Amsterdam's play - indeed located at the center of the stage -- is a middle-aged man wasting away from some terrible disease. Or it's a young woman, dying well before her time, and, for her ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Blood From a Stone (The New Group/Theatre Row)
In Blood from a Stone, Tommy Nohilly, a first-time playwright, means to draw the most poisonous family portrait since the Westons, of Osage County, Oklahoma, last got together to bury one of their own. It's a tall order, ...
|
