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  Theatre in Review: Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons)
You can safely call Will Arbery one of the bravest playwrights around. In Heroes of the Fourth Turning -- not a title one would wish on any play -- he has populated the stage with conservative Catholic intellectuals, ...
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Theatre in Review: All My Fathers (La MaMa)
In his new play, Paul David Young takes a remarkably creaky premise and runs rings around it. The "my" of the title refers to David Younger, a middle-aged gay playwright living in New York but, as the play begins, visiting his ...
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Theatre in Review: Round Table (59E59)
The playwright Liba Vaynberg can fairly be described as a mistress of the unexpected. For one thing, she has in Round Table written a romantic comedy, a genre that currently seems as extinct as the dodo. For another, ...
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Theatre in Review: Kingfishers Catch Fire (Irish Rep)/(A)loft Modulation (ART/New York Theatres)
Two recently opened historical dramas have very different concerns and viewpoints but they share a skeptical opinion of the post-World War II years, which, both playwrights suggest, weren't a haven of peace and prosperity as is sometimes ...
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Theatre in Review: runboyrun & In Old Age (New York Theatre Workshop)
When first seen at the Playwrights Realm, Sojourners, the first entry in Mfoniso Udofia's nine-part Ufot Cycle, about the travels and travails of a Nigerian-American family, came across as a poignant and carefully observed ...
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Theatre in Review: Fifty Million Frenchmen (York Theatre Company)
For its latest round of Musicals in Mufti -- concert stagings of rarely seen shows -- York is paying tribute to Cole Porter, a plan likely to be endorsed by every right-thinking man, woman, and child in the five boroughs and beyond. ...
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Theatre in Review: The Height of the Storm (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
I can't be absolutely sure -- memory, as the playwright Florian Zeller knows, is a tricky thing -- but I believe The Height of the Storm may be the first play to lose its mind.
How else to explain the cunningly ...
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Theatre in Review: Wives (Playwrights Horizons)/Mothers (The Playwrights Realm)
Rarely do circumstances deliver such an obvious pairing of titles for a dual review; in addition, these two attractions are marked by similar strategies: Each begins as a satire, displaying a fair amount of wit before abandoning laughter ...
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Theatre in Review: Caesar and Cleopatra (Gingold Theatrical Group/Theatre Row)
David Staller, the man behind Gingold Theatrical Group, loves the works of George Bernard Shaw with a burning ardor -- a fact that, alone, makes him a valuable member of the New York theatre community. I only wish he trusted ...
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Theatre in Review: Fern Hill (59E59)
If nothing else, the spaghetti vongole sounds absolutely scrumptious. Early on in Fern Hill, Mark Linn-Baker, playing an aging rocker -- fitted out in faux Jerry Garcia style by the costume designer, Patricia ...
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Theatre in Review: Novenas for a Lost Hospital (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
In many ways, I am the ideal audience member for Cusi Cram's fantasia about the life and death of St. Vincent's Hospital, a once-vital Greenwich Village institution that was unaccountably allowed to vanish. As a longtime resident of ...
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Theatre in Review: Filomena Marturano: Un matrimono a la Caribeña (Repertorio Español)
Just about any visit to Repertorio Español reveals how many accomplished actors the company has at its command. This time around, the name to note is Zulema Clares as the title character -- a former prostitute, now the long ...
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Theatre in Review: Betrayal (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
Even given Harold Pinter's reputation as the master of dramatic minimalism, the new Broadway revival of Betrayal is almost alarmingly stripped-down. The actors often have little more than a couple of chairs with ...
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Theatre in Review. L.O.V.E.R. (Pershing Square Signature Center)
Lois Robbins' solo show begins with her slumped over the washing machine in a state of post-coital bliss. As it happens, her first serious relationship was with the aforementioned appliance. At a very early age -- I mean ...
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Theatre in Review: American Moor (Red Bull Theater/Cherry Lane Theatre)
"You see, I have broken the fourth wall." This statement, made by the actor Keith Hamilton Cobb, is hardly necessary, since he has stepped off the stage of the Cherry Lane and, for a moment, stands in the center aisle. More to the ...
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Theatre in Review: Dust (Next Door at NYTW)
As the priest tells the faithful on Ash Wednesday, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is the immediate prospect for Alice, the protagonist of Milly Thomas' solo play, who wakes up in a morgue, a suicide. Not that she ...
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Theatre in Review: Felix Starro (Ma-Yi Theater Company/Theatre Row)
The people behind Felix Starro have on their hands some fascinating and extremely novel subject matter; it's too bad that no one seems to know what to do with it. A musical that cries out for a daringly theatrical approach has been ...
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Theatre in Review: Eureka Day (Colt Coeur/Walkerspace)
Bravely tackling a red-hot topic currently inflaming our social discourse, Eureka Day seemingly breaks one of the cardinal rules of playwrighting, adopting a different tone for virtually every scene. That it treads in such ...
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Theatre in Review: Contact High (Theatre 511)
It is high time for musical theatre to graduate from high school; the creators of such shows have developed an unhealthy obsession with social pressures, sexual identity, popularity (or the lack of it), and all the other challenges facing ...
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Theatre in Review: Make Believe (Second Stage Theater/Tony Kiser Theater)
Make Believe is populated with children who play some very adult games; the playwright, Bess Wohl, is a pretty audacious game-player herself. Only someone with nerves of steel would put a quartet of young characters, played ...
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