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  Theatre in Review: Time's Journey Through a Room (The Play Company/ART New York Theatre)
Near the beginning of Time's Journey Through a Room, we see a man, seated with his back to the audience in a notably sterile-looking living room. Standing, down front, speaking directly to the audience, the actress Maho ...
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Theatre in Review: Twelfth Night (The Acting Company/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)
The first glimpses one gets of Maria Aitken's production set off alarm bells. Lee Savage's set depicts the kind of whitewashed villa that adorns seaside towns all over Europe; it appears to have been built no earlier than ...
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Theatre in Review: Bump (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
This has been the Week of Irrelevant Subplots: Earlier, I saw Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which interrupts its main action, about a romantic quadrangle and machismo run amok, with a series of scenes set in the afterlife, featuring a ...
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Theatre in Review: Operation Crucible/Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Two current, and very different, productions consider the definition of masculinity as it applies to society as a whole. A vivid slice of World War II history is served up, if not always coherently, in Kieran Knowles' new play, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Jewish King Lear (Metropolitan Playhouse)
The persistence of the Yiddish theatre into the twenty-first century, a good seventy years after it ceased to be a major cultural force in New York, continues to astonish. In recent seasons, we have gotten Yiddish-language productions of
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Theatre in Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night (Brooklyn Academy of Music)
It's fascinating to consider how many ways there are to play Mary Tyrone, the spiritually poisoned, and poisonous, matriarch of Eugene O'Neill's family tragedy. Constance Cummings -- admittedly recalled through the mists of memory - ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gentleman Caller (Abingdon Theatre Company/Cherry Lane Theatre)
Philip Dawkins has written a play about Tennessee Williams and William Inge, and, having seen it, I'm wondering why. The Gentleman Caller treats two of the twentieth-century American theatre's most ...
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Theatre in Review: Dance Nation (Playwrights Horizons)
That Clare Barron is a sly one; she has a sneaky way of making you wonder where on earth she is going with an idea -- and then, before you know it, you've been won over. So it was with You Got Older, a 2014 work about adult ...
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Theatre in Review: Alternating Currents/217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous
Two new plays explore, in very different ways, the intersection of private lives and political concerns. Alternating Currents draws its inspiration from a distinctive feature of New York life, Electchester, the complex erected in ...
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Theatre in Review: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (New York Theatre Workshop)
In this 1976 work, Caryl Churchill has achieved something equally notable and dubious: She has written a play that is simultaneously interesting and boring. Watching it, I felt my patience being tried, repeatedly and at length. And ...
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Theatre in Review: Unexpected Joy (York Theatre Company)
Unexpected Joy starts on a wry, welcoming note with Joy, a pop singer of a certain age, gliding her way through a lovely, rueful tune titled "How Do We Go On?" It's the kind of thing you might have heard on the radio in the late ...
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Theatre in Review: Judas (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble)
Robert Patrick's drama about the birth of Christianity may be titled Judas, but it's Pontius Pilate who gets all the tastiest speeches. There's a kind of rough justice at work here. In so many stage and film versions, ...
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Theatre in Review: Summer and Smoke (Classic Stage Company/Transport Group)
In many ways, Dane Laffrey's set for this new production of Summer and Smoke tells the tale: The designer has devised a white deck with a matching white dropped ceiling. Furniture is kept to a minimum, aside from half ...
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Theatre in Review: A Brief History of Women (Stephen Joseph Theatre/59E59)
"Houses. They never forget you." So says an elderly, wheelchair-bound lady surveying the manor house where, several lifetimes ago, she was terribly unhappy. This particular house has plenty to remember, as it has been dreamed up by Alan ...
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Theatre in Review: Henry V (The Public Theater)/Replay (DugOut Theatre/59E59)
These two new productions don't really dazzle, but each of them features a leading actress who is well worth your attention. Henry V is the latest offering of the Public Theater's Mobile Unit, which takes vest-pocket productions of ...
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Theatre in Review: Saint Joan (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Saint Joan can't catch a break. Last season, she was made the heroine of a risibly bad musical, Joan of Arc: Into the Fire. This season, we get the calamitous Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Saint Joan. At this rate, ...
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Theatre in Review: Summer (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre)
Any show that stars LaChanze can't be all bad, although, in the case of Summer, it's not for lack of trying. The actress has been a joy to behold ever since her breakthrough appearance in Once on This Island in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Iceman Cometh (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
It's funny how a production, even a flawed one, can cast a new light on a play. I've seen many productions of Eugene O'Neill's whiskey-soaked masterpiece, but it wasn't until the other day, at the Jacobs, that I had a sudden flash: ...
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Theatre in Review: Travesties (Roundabout Theatre Company)
Travesties is a madhouse of a play, and, at Roundabout, under the direction of Patrick Marber, it is elegantly appointed and filled with the best sort of lunatics. In this 1974 work, the playwright takes notice of the ...
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Theatre in Review: Transfers (MCC Theater)
The playwright Lucy Thurber has often scrutinized the town-and-gown class system of Western Massachusetts' college towns; in Transfers, she gives this material a provocative new spin, adding race to the mix. This time, ...
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