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  Theatre in Review: Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (Atlantic Theater Company)
When it comes to smack talk, Stephen Adly Guirgis is our poet laureate. In play after play, he rounds up gangs of streetwise smart-mouths who let fly with enough invective to take down whole populations; so scalding is the ...
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Theatre in Review: Greater Clements (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
In plays such as A Bright New Boise, The Few, and Lewiston/Clarkston, Samuel D. Hunter has established himself as a leading commentator on our national decline; his depiction of Idaho lives ravaged by poverty, ...
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Theatre in Review: Judgment Day (Park Avenue Armory)
The ancillary spaces at Park Avenue Armory, that elaborately decorated Victorian pile, are trimmed in holly, lights, and Christmas trees these nights, calling up a deluxe Dickensian vision of the holidays that warms one's body and soul. ...
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Theatre in Review: The Thin Place (Playwrights Horizons)
Lucas Hnath's latest play is a ghost story -- or maybe not. Possibly it's an elegant fake-out, an exercise in the power of suggestion. Or maybe it's a serious consideration of the numinous, an attempt at piercing the diaphanous ...
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Theatre in Review: The Half-Life of Marie Curie (Minetta Lane Theatre)
Improbably, as if via nuclear fission, the life of an iconic female scientist is converted into sparkling high comedy in this amusing, enlightening two-hander. If you're expecting a reverent biography of the co-discoverer of radium -- I ...
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Theatre in Review: one in two (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
For his new drama, which is startlingly unlike his history-based works, Sugar in Our Wounds and Fireflies, Donja R. Love has appropriated the setup of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit for his own urgent purposes. ...
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Theatre in Review: One November Yankee (Delaware Theatre Company/59E59)
In One November Yankee --- a play that twists itself into pretzels for reasons that remain mysterious -- the writer, Joshua Ravetch, invents a tripartite sibling act. Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gospel of John (Sheen Center)
At the beginning of his solo show, Ken Jennings says that his decision to memorize St. John's Gospel began as a prayer, but the result onstage at the Sheen Center is more of a recitation. The actor approaches this sacred text with ...
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Theatre in Review: Harry Townsend's Last Stand (City Center Stage II)
If it's December, it must be time for summer stock, or so one might think while sitting through this mild, slow-moving father-and-son wrangle. Even as performed by a pair of popular television actors with extensive stages resumes, this ...
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Theatre in Review: The Young Man from Atlanta (Signature Theatre)
Early on in The Young Man from Atlanta, Lily Dale, a frivolous yet frightened and grief-ridden Texas matron, discusses her favorite conspiracy theory. It is 1950, but Lily Dale, who spends much of her time in the past, can't ...
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Theatre in Review: A Bright Room Called Day (Public Theater)
When the projections are the best thing about a production, you've got a problem. A Bright Room Called Day is largely set in early 1930s Berlin -- when it isn't making side excursions into the mind of playwright Tony Kushner ...
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Theatre in Review: Fires in the Mirror (Signature Theatre)
Signature Theatre is offering theatergoers the golden opportunity to catch up with the first of Anna Deavere Smith's theatrical hauntings -- really, the word "play" is inadequate to what she does -- in which she channels the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Inheritance, Parts One and Two (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
That an enormous cherry tree is a key image in The Inheritance is appropriate, since Matthew Lopez's drama is something of a dramatic botanical experiment, transplanting the trunk of E. M. Forster's Howard's End
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Theatre in Review: The Underlying Chris/Fefu and Her Friends
Will Eno's apparent yen to be a Thornton Wilder for the twenty-first century reaches its apex in The Underlying Chris (at Second Stage), which uses a battery of theatrical devices to tell the tale of an unremarkable life. The ...
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Theatre in Review: Measure for Measure (The Public Theater)
Scholars often refer to Measure for Measure as one of William Shakespeare's "problem" plays, which is a nice way of saying they don't know what to make of it. Indeed, it functions as a kind of Rorschach test: There are so ...
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Theatre in Review: A Christmas Carol (Lyceum Theatre)/Einstein's Dreams (59E59)
It's been a week of signs and wonders in the theatre, featuring dramas in which magic and science seem oddly like mirror images of each other. If, this early in the holiday season, you're already feeling up to your neck in tinsel, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Crucible (Connelly Theatre)
Eighty percent of Bedlam's new production of The Crucible (staged in association with The Nora Theatre Company) is so thunderously good that you're likely to forgive the haywire twenty percent. It might take you a little ...
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Theatre in Review: History of Violence (Schaubühne Berlin/St. Ann's Warehouse)
History of Violence is a horror story, but a contemplative one; it features one of the most disturbing acts I have ever seen onstage, out of which it teases a multiplicity of meanings. It is a difficult, demanding, and extraordinary ...
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Theatre in Review: Pumpgirl (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Irish playwrights seem to love nothing more than an evening of intertwined monologues; so many plays of this type have come our way lately that I wonder if dialogue hasn't been banned on the island outright. Such a format can work ...
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Theatre in Review: Cyrano (The New Group/Daryl Roth Theatre)
A musical Cyrano de Bergerac? Many have tried, none have succeeded. By my count, the current attraction at the Daryl Roth is the eighth attempt at musicalizing Edmond Rostand's fabulous war horse -- and that doesn't include ...
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