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  Theatre in Review: A Man for All Seasons (Fellowship for Performing Arts/Theatre Row)
When I was a boy in Catholic school, I thought I understood saints: They were merely people of superior virtue -- chastity, charity, prayerfulness, or what have you. The older I get, however, the more elusive they seem, their essential ...
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Theatre in Review: The American Tradition (New Light Theater Project/13th Street Repertory)
If Bertolt Brecht were alive today, he might be creating something very much like The American Tradition, a confrontational, blackly comic tale that builds a bridge between the ghastly realities of the antebellum South and ...
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Theatre in Review: Colin Quinn: Red State Blue State (Minetta Lane Theatre)
Other than the Statue of Liberty, Colin Quinn is currently my favorite American icon. The comedian has decided to wade into the degraded national discourse -- an act of folly, you might say, since half of the United States isn't ...
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Theatre in Review: The Convent (ART New York Theatres)
In her new play, Jessica Dickey assembles half a dozen women in a medieval convent in the south of France for a decidedly oddball spiritual retreat. The place is run by the middle-aged Mother Abbess, a purely honorific title, since ...
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Theatre in Review: Awake (The Barrow Group)
If you've been alive and awake the last couple of years, you may have noticed a certain fractiousness seeping into American culture, having to do with race, class, and anything else you can think of. Even without mentioning the name of a ...
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Theatre in Review: About Alice (Theatre for a New Audience)
If you ask me, Theatre for a New Audience has mistimed its latest attraction. About Alice runs through February 3, thereby missing Valentine's Day by a week and a half. An extension is in order, for it is difficult to ...
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Theatre in Review: Trick or Treat (Northern Stage/59E59)
There are more tricks than treats in this ungainly hybrid of a thriller, domestic comedy, and dysfunctional family slugfest. This is one of those twisty enterprises that defy detailed description lest one give away too much, but I can ...
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Theatre in Review: Alone It Stands (59E59)
"Rugby, that well-known game of Celtic origin." So says one of the characters in On Blueberry Hill, also at 59E59. His point is entirely sarcastic, but don't tell that to the characters of Alone It Stands, almost all ...
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Theatre in Review: LaBute New Theater Festival (St. Louis Actors' Studio) Davenport Theatre
Previous editions of this annual event have combined one piece by Neil LaBute with works by new writers. This time out, it's ninety minutes of pure LaBute, a format that may not be in the playwright's best interest. A professional ...
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Theatre in Review: Intelligence (Next Door @ NYTW)
I worry about our playwrights. I really do. Most of the works I've seen in the last few weeks have tackled important issues and asked probing questions, but too often they have been yoked to plots that beggar belief. Whether it was the ...
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Theatre in Review: On Blueberry Hill (59E59)/Blue Ridge (Atlantic Theater)
Two recently opened plays focus on criminal punishment or rehab; oddly, it is the lifers of On Blueberry Hill who find a strange sort of redemption, while, in Blue Ridge, the participants in a warm and fuzzy, ...
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Theatre in Review: Choir Boy (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Even with the current wave of gay-themed plays landing on Broadway in the last season or so, Choir Boy finds something new to say. Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney wastes no time, crystallizing his original, ...
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Theatre in Review: Chambre Noir (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Chambre Noir (Under the Radar/Public Theater) This strange, dreamlike, compelling piece takes the audience into the mind, on her deathbed, of Valerie Solanas, one of the strangest personalities to be coughed up by the cultural ...
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Theatre in Review: Minor Character (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Uncle Vanya gets the chop in this exercise from the theatre troupe known as New Saloon. The piece offers a quick tour of Chekhov's play, using a mashup of six translations, ranging from Marion Fell's 1918 version to one ...
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Theatre in Review: Frankenstein (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
In such theatre pieces as ADA/AVA and Lula del Ray, the troupe known as Manual Cinema has done remarkable things with its own brand of multimedia, which includes the use of overhead projectors displaying images that combine ...
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Theatre in Review: Slave Play (New York Theatre Workshop)
Advance publicity for Slave Play has anointed playwright Jeremy O. Harris as this season's new provocateur, a fearless talent ready to overturn whatever pieties are left regarding race, sexuality, and history. ...
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Theatre in Review: Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (Signature Theatre Company)
If, in this 2004 work now getting a dazzling revival under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the great Lynn Nottage hasn't delivered a fully realized play, she at least provides a hair-raising title character to keep us ...
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Theatre in Review: Christmas in Hell (York Theatre Company)
A piece of holiday fruitcake from 1964 sets off a chain of events that throws open the doors of Hell in this relentlessly jokey new musical featuring book, music, and lyrics by Gary Apple. Unfortunately, a fifty-five-year-old bakery ...
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Theatre in Review: Network (Belasco Theatre)
Network, Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 cinematic jeremiad about the fallen state of television news, warned audiences that the media was being destroyed by slick, soulless technology and audience-pandering. Such accusations ...
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Theatre in Review: The Net Will Appear/Bitter Greens (59E59)
While The Hello Girls continues to connect audiences with a vital piece of American history, the other two venues at 59E59 are presenting distinctly odd takes on human behavior. The characters in The Net Will Appearand ...
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