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  Theatre in Review: Give Me Your Hand (Irish Repertory Theatre Online)
The Irish Times once called Paul Durcan "the most playful poet in Ireland" and seeing Give Me Your Hand, one can easily see why. This theatre piece, taken from a 1994 volume of the same name, is a kind of guided tour ...
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Theatre in Review: American Dreams (Working Theater)
Who better than Working Theater to delve into the tortuous American way of immigration? Despite our national ambivalence -- I'm being polite here - about this issue, we depend on immigrant labor, an inconvenient fact from which we ...
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Theatre in Review: Belfast Blues (Irish Repertory Online)
Geraldine Hughes had the kind of childhood of which solo theatre pieces are made, though perhaps that could be true of anyone who spent their formative years in Northern Ireland during the '70s and '80s. Not everyone has her eye, ...
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Theatre in Review: Incidental Moments of the Day (Apple Family Productions)
For the finale of his trilogy, The Apple Family: Life on Zoom, Richard Nelson shakes things up -- the right response, one supposes, to this summer of turmoil and fury. The playwright is moving on and, in many cases, so are his ...
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Theatre in Review: Love, Noël: The Songs and Letters of Noël Coward (Irish Repertory Theatre Online)
"Strange how potent cheap music is." This line of dialogue, one of Noël Coward's most famous -- it's from Private Lives -- hardly applies to his own output, which long ago took its place among the crown jewels of the musical ...
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Theatre in Review: The Weir (Irish Repertory Theatre Online)
In the annals of pandemic theatre, The Weir is something new. Conor McPherson's play focuses on five characters drinking and telling tales in an Irish country pub, and the digital wizards at the Irish Rep have, using ...
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Theatre in Review: The Line (The Public Theater Online)
In an awful way, The Line premiered at exactly the right moment: as the rest of the country outside the Northeast is backsliding, with surging rates of infection and rising death tolls, this documentary piece presents the ...
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Theatre in Review: And So We Come Forth (Apple Family Productions)
The Apple Family, of Rhinebeck, New York, is back, offering both much-needed comfort, along with a few thoughts to keep one up at night. Richard Nelson's clan, seen in a quartet of plays at the Public between 2010 and 2013, ...
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Theatre in Review: What Do We Need to Talk About? (The Public Theater/YouTube)
In troubled times, there's nothing like old friends, which is one -- but not the only -- reason why What Do We Need to Talk About? is such a welcome expression of grace. Richard Nelson's play, currently available on ...
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Theatre in Review: 72 Miles to Go.../The Artist Will Be With You in a Moment
In 72 Miles to Go, at Roundabout Theatre's Laura Pels Theatre, playwright Hilary Bettis tells a simple, plaintive tale guaranteed to shred the conscience of anyone who sees it. In constructing her dead-on indictment of ...
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Theatre in Review: Endlings (New York Theatre Workshop)
Celine Song, a new playwright, has a highly creative and theatrical turn of mind, even when she maroons herself on dramatic high ground, leaving herself with no room to maneuver. Endlings cannot be classified as a success, ...
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Theatre in Review: Unknown Soldier (Playwrights Horizons)
The upstage wall of Mark Wendland's set for Unknown Soldier features a clock without hands, an appropriate touch for a show in which the normal rules of time have been suspended: Characters from several eras spill across the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hot Wing King (Signature Theatre)/I Am Nobody (The Tank)
The plays of Katori Hall usually have some novelty value, and The Hot Wing King is no exception. This time around, she focuses on a circle of black gay male friends living in Memphis, a decision that is more radical ...
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Theatre in Review: Mr. Toole (59E59)/About Love (Sheen Center)
There are gusts of unrequited desire blowing through our theatres this week; note that I decline to use the word "love." This is because each play under consideration today presents the latter state as a matter of obsession, driving its ...
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Theatre in Review: The Perplexed (Manhattan Theatre Club, City Center Stage I)
On any given day, Richard Greenberg can write rings around any other playwright, but this time he has done it to himself. The Perplexed -- an overstuffed, overpopulated, and wildly overlong drawing room comedy -- is ...
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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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