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  Theatre in Review: Hang Time (The Flea Theater)
The first thing one sees in Hang Time is an image of such unmitigated horror that one fears director Zora Howard has set an impossible hurdle for Zora Howard, the playwright. It features three Black men, the play's ...
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Theatre in Review: Misty (The Shed)
How much self-consciousness can a play handle before it tumbles over? That's the stress test playwright/star Arinzé Kene applies in Misty, a play about a play, or maybe a monologue about a monologue, with a side order ...
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Theatre in Review: Black Odyssey (Classic Stage Company)
Playwright Marcus Gardley is no stranger to ambition, having previously dramatized a fictional lawsuit over the killing of Malcom X in X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation and transferred Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of ...
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Theatre in Review: Arden of Faversham (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Who wants to kill the title character of Arden of Faversham? Actually, who doesn't? The list of those plotting the murder of this prosperous bourgeois man of affairs begins with his wife, Alice, and her lover, Mosby a (horrors ...
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Theatre in Review: The Harder They Come (Public Theater)
Ask any show fan and you'll get the same answer: A musical has a score (recorded on an original cast album) and a film has a soundtrack. (In certain theatre chat rooms, if you confuse the two, they will flay you alive.) The distinction is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Coast Starlight (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse)
The Coast Starlight may be the first play written in the conditional tense. Playwright Keith Bunin assembles a half a dozen strangers on a train headed from Los Angeles to Seattle, focusing on, of all things, an ...
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Theatre in Review: How to Defend Yourself (New York Theatre Workshop)
How to Defend Yourself left me deeply grateful not to be twenty-one. Liliana Padilla's new play, which announces them as a talent to watch, looks at college students exploring the treacherous terrain of dating and sex ...
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Theatre in Review: Dark Disabled Stories (Bushwick Starr/Public Theater)
"If you came here to pity me, you can leave." So says Ryan J. Haddad, fearlessly eyeballing the audience at the Public's Susan Stein Shiva Theatre. Indeed, you can check any sentimental notions at the door of this eye-opening, often ...
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Theatre in Review: The Rewards of Being Frank (New York Classical Theatre/ART NY Theatres)
How many actresses can slay when playing Liza Minnelli and/or Lady Bracknell? Christine Pedi long ago emerged from several editions of Forbidden Broadway as a celebrity spoofer nonpareil, especially her peerless Liza, a side ...
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Theatre in Review: Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
If, following the 1995 premiere of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, someone had predicted to me that Lynn Nottage would one day become a top American playwright, I would have nicely suggested they pull the other one. A ...
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Theatre in Review: Elyria (Atlantic Theater Company)
Ambition is a great thing in a playwright but, in the case of Elyria, Deepa Purohit's reach exceeds her grasp; this tangled, multi-generational tale might test the skills of her more accomplished colleagues, and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Best We Could (a family tragedy) (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
For a play to qualify as a tragedy, the people in it must, at a minimum, be interesting. That's the problem, with The Best We Could, a road trip drama that steers uncertainly toward a big revelation that destroys a family of ...
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Theatre in Review: The Trees (Playwrights Horizons/Page 73 Productions)
Consider this premise. Siblings David and Sheila come stumbling in, blotto, from a party. (She, a resident of Seattle, is visiting him at the family home in Connecticut.) Wandering around a local park, they suddenly find themselves stuck ...
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Theatre in Review: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (Brooklyn Academy of Music)
When The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window opened in 1964, New York Times reviewer Howard Taubman noted that it "lacked concision and cohesion. One remembers isolated passages rather than the work as a whole." Fine; ...
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Theatre in Review: Love (National Theatre/Park Avenue Armory)
"We need to find a way to talk about things that we don't want to see." That's playwright/director Alexander Zeldin talking, and he achieves his goal magnificently in Love. Set in a UK homeless shelter, the play ...
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Theatre in Review: Becomes a Woman (City Center Stage II)
"You have to fight like hell all the time just to get the ordinary things that you're entitled to. If you don't want trouble, you don't want much else, either." Wise words from a shopgirl named Florry and, perhaps, the theme of this ...
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Theatre in Review: The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (The New Group)
Whatever else you want to say about Thomas Bradshaw's contemporary gloss on Chekhov, Parker Posey is the funniest Arkadina you're ever likely to see. Known here as Irene, she is an actress of considerable note, at least in ...
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Theatre in Review: Conversations After Sex (ThisIsPopBaby/Irish Arts Center)
As Maureen McGovern has long reminded us, there's got to be a morning after. Or a late-afternoon postlude. Or, well, any time of the day or night as the heroine of Conversations After Sex makes her way across dozens of Dublin ...
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Theatre in Review: Letters from Max, a ritual (Signature Theatre Company)
It's not the length of one's life that counts; it's the intensity with which it is lived; that's the idea behind Letters from Max, Sarah Ruhl's deeply personal memoir of the late poet Max Ritvo. Before his death at 25 ...
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Theatre in Review: Amani (National Black Theatre/Rattlestick Theater)
Amani covers roughly two decades in the title character's life and it's telling that, whether seen as grade schooler or a young adult, she seems virtually the same. Playwright a. k. payne's fey, fantastical approach ...
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