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  Theatre in Review: Chester Bailey (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Even if Chester Bailey were a much weaker play, it would still be irresistible for the sensational father-son teaming of Reed Birney and Ephraim Birney. But Joseph Dougherty's beautifully shaped two ...
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Theatre in Review: Hound Dog (Ars Nova/Playco at Greenwich House)
It's a counterintuitive thought, to be sure, but the best playwrights understand the art of banality. Consider how Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, and this year's star rookie Gracie Gardner have mastered the knack of dialogue that says nothing ...
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Theatre in Review: Chekhov's First Play (Dead Centre/Irish Arts Center)
Chances are, you've never seen the first play written by Anton Chekhov, and you won't see it at the Irish Arts Center either, no matter the title of the current attraction. There's a good reason for this: The original script, an unfinished ...
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Theatre in Review: Albert Camus' The Fall (Soho Playhouse)
The Fall is set in an Amsterdam dive bar that doubles as a Last Chance Saloon of the Soul. The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence -- not his real name, to be sure, not after what he has gone through -- shuffles in, pours ...
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Theatre in Review: Wuthering Heights (Wise Children/National Theatre/St. Ann's Warehouse)
I'm not one to accuse others of criminal tendencies, but let's face it: Emma Rice gets away with murder. The writer/director has the knack of taking unlikely materials from literature and film -- for example, Noël Coward's Brief ...
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Theatre in Review: 1776 (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
The furies circling the Roundabout revival of 1776, the classic musical about the Continental Congress and the rough birth of the American republic, may be more interesting than the production itself. Featuring a cast ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gold Room (I am a slow tide/HERE)
The last thing you want to hear about from the guy you just picked up is his case of chlamydia. This may go double if both of you are men, and he is also complaining that his girlfriend doesn't understand him. This unpromising beginning (fo ...
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Theatre in Review: Leopoldstadt (Longacre Theatre)
Tom Stoppard's latest, and possibly last, drama is a monumental work, a threnody for a family, a way of life, and an idea of civilization. It begins in 1899 with a large, wealthy, and well-connected Austrian Jewish clan making merry ...
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Theatre in Review: Everything's Fine (DR2 Theatre)
Douglas McGrath's solo show is in the tradition, stretching back at least to James Thurber, of warm, homey memoirs about growing up in a heartland America marked by eccentricity and mild grotesqueries. The operating words here are "h ...
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Theatre in Review: Cost of Living (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Cost of Living is set in Brooklyn and Bayonne, and yet it had me oddly thinking of Margaret Thatcher. Or, maybe, not so oddly: It was Mrs. Thatcher, you will recall, who, infamously, noted, "Who is society? There is no such ...
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Theatre in Review: Death of a Salesman (Hudson Theatre)
Since the 1970s, Willy Loman has, on average, visited us every dozen years or so, riding on a shoeshine and a smile (as playwright Arthur Miller so memorably put it) and heading for a crackup from which there is no return. It's not ...
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Theatre in Review: Ink'dWell (New Light Theater Project/59E59)
For nearly two hours, Ink'dWell roots around in the aftermath of a man's death without finding anything particularly interesting or dramatic to say about it. The deceased is Isaac, golden boy in a Black family that summers on ...
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Theatre in Review: I'm Revolting (Atlantic Theater Company)
The title certainly gives one pause, and the setting, a skin cancer clinic in Manhattan, hardly seems promising. One can be entirely forgiven for slumping in one's seat at the Atlantic, steeling one's nerves for an evening likely to be ...
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Theatre in Review: Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Elevator Repair Service/Public Theater)
Strange how an event from the past can insert itself into the contemporary conversation. The 1965 debate, at the Cambridge Union, between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, was an impressive matchup at a time when race in America was a ...
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Theatre in Review: Weightless (WP Theatre)
Early on in Weightless, somebody notes, "Most people never know there are gods walking among us -- in fact, most people have forgotten the gods altogether." Not in musical theatre, where those fractious and superhuman ...
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Theatre in Review: american (tele)visions (New York Theatre Workshop/Theater Mitu)
In american (tele)visions, a family of undocumented immigrants unravels against a shifting dreamscape defined by Walmarts, video games, and nonstop TV broadcasts. The time is the Reagan 1980s; Octavio, the patriarch, has ...
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Theatre in Review: This Beautiful Future (Cherry Lane Theatre)
The set onstage at the Cherry Lane is striking, if not exactly appealing: a purple velour interior, with curved walls at stage right and upstage windows disclosing a stark hallway. The only furnishings are a mattress and a couple of ...
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Theatre in Review: Four Saints in Three Acts (The Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater)
"Pigeons on the grass, alas." So goes one of the most-quoted lines from Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera libretto by Gertrude Stein, written in 1927 and set to music by Virgil Thomson in 1928. Like ...
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Theatre in Review: Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski (Theatre for a New Audience)
As Cassandra could have told you, prophets of doom rarely get a welcome reception; when faced with the worst, most people reflexively look away, or change the subject, or deny the irrefutable evidence in front of them. (Ask any scientist ...
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Theatre in Review: Once Upon a (korean) Time (Ma-Yi Theater Company)
Daniel K. Isaac's inventive chronicle play, now at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre, weaves historical traumas and folk tales into a seamless braid that, over the course of a century, extends halfway around the world. Just as the ...
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