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  Theatre in Review: Ross & Rachel (Brits Off Broadway/59E59)
They say there are two sides to every marriage -- and in Ross & Rachel, they are both embodied by a single person. The actress Molly Vevers channels both partners in a wildly mismatched pair whose lives are unraveling ...
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Theatre in Review: The Total Bent (The Public Theater)
"We're not really doing a musical," Stew, the author and co-composer of The Total Bent, told the New York Times the other day. This is not a surprise: In Passing Strange, his previous work of whatever you' ...
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Theatre in Review: The Ruins of Civilization (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)
Penelope Skinner has seen the future and it is wet. If you think Britain is rainy now, wait until you experience its waterlogged version in The Ruins of Civilization. Skinner's drama is set in the near future, when the ...
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Theatre in Review: Cal in Camo (Colt Coeur/Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
When the lights come up on an actress, sitting slumped at downstage right, using a pump to extract her breast milk and looking depressed as all get-out, you somehow know that, in this production, laughs will be at a premium. So it is with < ...
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Theatre in Review: Daphne's Dive (Signature Theatre)
As often happens in neighborhood bars -- and plays about them -- the denizens of Daphne's Dive form an extended family. Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes' play chronicles tavern owner Daphne and her friends and relations over the ...
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Theatre in Review: Turn Me Loose (Westside Theatre)
Turn Me Loose could be titled The Education of Dick Gregory, as it tracks the political evolution of the comedian and his humor, from his first slickly delivered wisecracks to the latter-day jeremiads that call down ...
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Theatre in Review: A Better Place (The Directors Company/The Duke on 42nd Street)
A Better Place, a comedy about Manhattan real estate, is a property in need of a gut renovation. The perpetual New York obsession with finding chicer, more spacious, and more luxurious living space has long been a fertile ...
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Theatre in Review: Indecent (Vineyard Theatre)
Indecent begins with Lemml, a stage manager, introducing us to the members of the company; as each of them steps forward, dust falls off them in piles. (It practically pours out of their sleeves.) It's an apt image, as the ...
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Theatre in Review: City Stories (Brits Off Broadway/59E59)
James Phillips writes so beautifully that one wishes he would find more interesting things to write about. City Stories, a collection of short pieces on life in London, is filled with striking turns of phrase and ...
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Theatre in Review: Shoes and Baggage (The Cell)
Cheryl Stern, an actress and writer, is also a self-described "under-earner and over-spender" who never saw a sale she didn't like. (The words quoted come from her one and only appearance at Debtors Anonymous.) Shoes and ...
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Theatre in Review: Harper Regan (T. Schreiber Studio for Theatre & Film)
If Harper Regan were a game of baseball, it would consist of nothing but curveballs; the title character, a British woman who, in her fortieth year, finds her life slipping from its frame, is so perversely conceived that she ...
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Theatre in Review: Bianco (NoFit State Circus/St. Ann's Warehouse)
Even as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski are experiencing an emotional workout inside St. Ann's Warehouse, a circus tent has gone up outside on the plot of land adjacent to the theatre, where the members of the NoFit State Circus are ...
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Theatre in Review: Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre)
Dominique Morisseau's new play is set in a Louisiana high school that, at first glance, appears to be a harmonious place, if only because the different cliques and races keep to themselves. With enviable economy, she sketches in a ...
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Theatre in Review: Evening 1910 (Axis Theatre)
The mood is profoundly elegiac these nights at the Axis, where Randy Sharp and Paul Carbonara's new musical presents the experiences of some turn-of-the-last-century immigrants as if preserved in amber. With its view of a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Place We Built (The Flea Theater)
A showdown with the Budapest police opens a window on the degradation of Hungary's democracy in Sarah Gancher's ambitious and gripping new play. The place referred to in the title is The Seagull, a bar/nightclub/theatre run collectively by ...
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Theatre in Review: Crude (Black Lab Theatre/Ars Nova)
According to the program for Crude, it is one in an "energy series" of plays by Jordan Jaffe, each of which is designed to highlight a particular energy source. (He has also written plays about natural gas and wind.) I ...
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Theatre in Review: Idiot (HERE)
In their old nightclub act, The Revuers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green did a number called "Reader's Digest," in which they applied the condensed-books method to classic literature, summing them up in a four-line chorus. For example, Gon ...
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Theatre in Review: Toast (Jagged Fence Theatre/59E59)
From Eugene O'Neill's plays of the sea to Assistance, Leslye Headland's all-too-believable account of working for a movie mogul, playwrights love to draw for inspiration on the jobs they held when they were starting out. Such plays ...
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Theatre in Review: Kentucky (Page 73 Productions/Ensemble Studio Theatre)
Hiro, the heroine of Leah Nanako Winkler's new play, is a woman with a mission. A New Yorker in her late twenties, she is determined to return home to Kentucky for the marriage of her sister, Sophie. Although ostensibly there to ...
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Theatre in Review: Butterfly (59E59)
According to the press release, Butterfly is based on Madame Butterfly, but you have to squint awfully hard to see the resemblance. What this brief, wordless piece has in common with Puccini's opera is a supremely put ...
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