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  Theatre in Review: Suicide Forest (Ma-Yi Theater Company/ART-New York Theatres)
Suicide Forest is a fantasy on themes of identity in three movements. It is, by turns, brilliant, baffling, and highly self-indulgent. If, at times, it seems like an assault on the audience's sensibilities, it is equally unsparing ...
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Theatre in Review: Coal Country (The Public Theater)
For this stirring account of the Upper Big Branch mining disaster -- which killed more than two dozen men and exposed a series of illegal and flagrantly unsafe labor practices -- the documentarian playwrights Jessica Blank and Eri ...
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Theatre in Review: Bundle of Sticks (INTAR/Radio Drama Network)
In J. Julian Christopher's new play, the intense, sadistic Otto Naim runs a gay-conversion therapy center in arid, remote Coober Pedy, Australia. It's an interesting location: Coober Pedy, a center of opal mining, and most of its ...
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Theatre in Review: Mirrors (Parity Productions/Next Door at NYTW)
In Mirrors, playwright Azure D. Osborne-Lee takes us where few, if any, playwrights have gone before, into the milieu of lesbians living in the American South -- specifically, Mississippi in 1960. As you might imagine, it's a ...
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Theatre in Review: Cambodian Rock Band (Signature Theatre)
Nobody loves a plot twist more than the playwright Lauren Yee: In the early stages of what looks to be an extremely bright career, she has displayed a pronounced taste for narratives that -- rather like the slick historical ...
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Theatre in Review: Incantata (Irish Repertory Theatre)
If nothing else, Incantata offers the opportunity to get acquainted with the fine Irish poet Paul Muldoon. A longtime resident of this country, he has been poetry editor of The New Yorker and is a faculty ...
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Theatre in Review: A Sign of the Times (Theatre 511)
Stephen Lloyd Helper's new play apparently focuses on the existential crisis of a traffic controller working outside a construction site, but he has much bigger things on his mind. This nameless character is that guy one sees all ...
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Theatre in Review: We're Gonna Die (Second Stage Theater)
Don't be put off by the title of Young Jean Lee's new entertainment; in fact, it articulates the good news. And, if you've been feeling a little roiled by events lately -- and who among us has not? -- you might consider making a pit ...
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Theatre in Review: The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Transport Group/Abrons Arts Center)
Molly Brown is, apparently, so unsinkable that her musical keeps floating back to the surface. The fabulously nouveau riche wife of a Denver mining baron has, over the years, become a classic American character, not least because of her ...
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Theatre in Review: All the Natalie Portmans (MCC Theater)
There are all sorts of storms brewing in C. A. Johnson's play, and at the center of them all is Keyonna, the tart-tongued, unapologetically lesbian, sixteen-year-old heroine. Obviously brilliant -- she often skips her charter school ...
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Theatre in Review: Dana H. (Vineyard Theatre)
The current Vineyard season could be labeled "Ladies in Distress, in Plain Sight." In Is This a Room, the company's previous production, the writer-director, Tina Satter, turned the transcript of an FBI interview with the leaker ...
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Theatre in Review: Tumacho (Clubbed Thumb)/Mud/Drowning (Mabou Mines)
Two new productions provide a snapshot of the downtown theatre aesthetic now and then. Tumacho, at the Connelly Theatre, is the latest effort of Ethan Lipton, the playwright/songwriter whose semi-cabaret ...
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Theatre in Review: Anatomy of a Suicide (Atlantic Theater Company)
Alice Birch's new play begins as an exercise in organized chaos, gradually arranging itself into a triptych of tragedy covering three generations of women in a single family. It's a tough, bold piece of writing that proves ...
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Theatre in Review: Blues for an Alabama Sky (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
It's appropriate that Blues for an Alabama Sky begins with its heroine, Angel, being dragged home in a state of inebriation. After all, it is uptown New York, 1930, and the hangover from the Harlem Renaissance is commencing; Angel ...
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Theatre in Review: The Sabbath Girl (Penguin Rep Theatre/59E59)
The Sabbath Girl is the play that asks the question: Can the nice young Orthodox knish merchant find happiness with the fetching Shabbos goy next door? To which I respond: Is cream cheese fattening? Are pickles sour? Is the Pope ...
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Theatre in Review: Dracula/Frankenstein (Classic Stage Company)
Classic Stage has been converted to a house of horrors for the winter, although perhaps not in the way intended. In any case, it is offering new versions of two classic chillers, each of which has been adapted to death in various media. ...
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Theatre in Review: Chasing the River (Chain Theatre)/The Commons (59E59)
Chasing the River is a family drama that plays like crime fiction. Kat, a thirtyish steak house waitress living in Philadelphia, returns, for the first time in years, to the small Pennsylvania town where she grew up. It is ...
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Theatre in Review: Happy Birthday Doug (SoHo Playhouse)
Happy Birthday Doug marks the return of Drew Droege, the comic Margaret Mead of the gay set in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. The action -- a series of monologues -- unfolds at a birthday party held in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)/Where We Stand
Two new productions turn on vital questions of democracy and citizenship; one of them makes powerful use of specifics while the other flounders in a fog of generalities. Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) an En Garde Arts' ...
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Theatre in Review: Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)
Through the good offices of the Mint, we know about playwright Miles Malleson's grasp of post-World War I disillusionment among the British upper and middle classes. Such works as Conflict and Yours Unfaithfully, both ...
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