|
  Theatre in Review: Tell Hector I Miss Him (Atlantic Theater Company Stage Two)
Paola Lázaro's new play zeroes in on a fraught, ad hoc community in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There's Mostro, who is middle-aged and runs a bodega; he is hoping to have a baby with his wife, Samira. Little does he know, Samira is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Yen (MCC Theater at Lucille Lortel Theatre)
In Yen, director Trip Cullman and his gifted, intensely committed cast so persuasively stake out a landscape of poverty and neglect that one might not notice at first the contrivances and underlying sentimentality of
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Orange Julius (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
Julius, an ailing Vietnam vet, may be the title character of Basil Kreimendahl's new play, but I'm betting that the character you'll be talking about as you leave the theatre is Nut; once Julius' daughter and now his son, Nut is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Liar (Classic Stage Company)
Dishonesty is the best policy in The Liar, at least when it comes to delighting the audience. The title character, Dorante, a handsome, adventure-seeking young fellow, is new in town -- the town being Paris, 1643 -- and is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Oregon Trail / The Great American Drama
Two new Off Broadway productions are exercises in games and gamesmanship. Bekah Brunstetter's The Oregon Trail (Fault Line Theatre Company) is based on the computer game that was a middle school standby for a couple of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Incident at Hidden Temple (Pan-Asian Repertory/Theatre Row)
The incident referred to in the title of Damon Chua's play takes place at train station in Southwestern China in 1943; during a rest stop, young Ava Chao, egged on by a local blind man, wanders off to see the nearby Hidden Temple -- ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Peer Gynt and the Norwegian Hapa Band (Ma-Yi Theater Company/ART New York Theatre)
For years, New York City operated as a Peer Gynt-free zone; now we've gotten Ibsen's epic work twice in one season. This may be happening, I suspect, because, at one point in this notoriously rambling work, the title character, an ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Yours Unfaithfully (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)
What would 20th-century playwrights have done without adultery? The British especially would have been bereft without having a certain commandment to break onstage. Maugham, Coward, and Rattigan practically made an industry of it -- and, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: LaBute New Theater Festival (St. Louis Actors' Studio/59E59)
The winners of this new-play festival, named for the noted playwright Neil LaBute, seem to have been chosen mostly for their LaButian characteristics, including a sour, misanthropic view of male-female relations and a taste for ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Jitney (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Because it was written before all the shouting started, there is, I think, a slight tendency to see August Wilson's Jitney as a minor early work. Maybe so, but in Ruben Santiago-Hudson's hands, it has the ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Albatross (59E59)
In what may be the oddest literary event of the year, Albatross aims to give us the inside story of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Well, why not? Not having read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem since college, I ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Tempest (Donmar Warehouse at St. Ann's Warehouse)
Harriet Walter's Prospero is such a thrilling and original characterization that it very nearly justifies Phyllida Lloyd's over-interpreted staging of Shakespeare's late-career masterpiece. Many of the men I've seen in the ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Dork Knight (Abingdon Theatre Company)/Mope(Ensemble Studio Theatre)
Two new Off Broadway productions seem very different on the surface, yet both focus on men struggling to attain maturity while scrambling for success in show business -- and each of their definitions of success is warped by the milieu he ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Made in China (Wakka Wakka/59E59)
Do you remember when you were a kid and believed you could dig a hole to China in your backyard? Mary and Eddie, the puppet protagonists of Made in China, find a rather different route to that Asian powerhouse -- via the ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Harvey Theater/Brooklyn Academy of Music)
The ladies who make up the mother-daughter act at the heart of The Beauty Queen of Leenane are a wicked, hard-hearted pair and oh, how I've missed them. It has been nearly twenty years since Martin McDonagh's midnight ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Latin Standards (Under the Radar/The Public Theater)
If Latin Standards proves nothing else, it is that Marga Gomez is, now and forever, her father's daughter. Two decades ago she appeared at the Public with A Line Around the Block, which paid tribute to her dad, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Present (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
The Present begins with Cate Blanchett pointing a gun in the general direction of the audience; in a way, she is really taking aim at received ideas regarding the works of Anton Chekhov. The Present is a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Lula del Ray/Club Diamond (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
The Under the Radar Festival, that annual roundup of everything new and innovative in theatre, kicks off this year with two very different, but equally intriguing, experiments in film as theatre.
Manual Cinema, that band of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: God of Vengeance (New Yiddish Rep at LaMaMa Theatre)
"Today, the world is run by money." So says Sarah, the matriarch of the little family at the heart of Sholem Asch's scalding Yiddish tragedy. Written in 1907, God of Vengeance still packs plenty of shock value for ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Martin Luther on Trial (Fellowship for Performing Arts at Pearl Theatre Company)
There are two honestly gripping scenes in Martin Luther on Trial, neither of which has anything to do with the contrived theological courtroom drama dreamed up by the authors, Chris Cragin-Day and Max McLean. In ...
|
