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  Theatre in Review: The Dingdong (Pearl Theatre Company)
In a way, the title of the new attraction at the Pearl (playing in repertory with Stupid F---ing Bird) tells you all you need to know. Mark Shanahan has adapted this farce from Georges Feydeau's Le Dindon, which ...
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Theatre in Review: One Funny Mother (New World Stages)
Dena Blizzard enters onto a stage that looks as if it has hit by a hurricane, with toys and items of clothing scattered everywhere, and starts picking things up, like a dutiful housewife and mother. However, she worries that maybe ...
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Theatre in Review: The Father (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J Friedman Theatre)
Frank Langella said in a recent interview that playing King Lear was "a walk in the park" compared to the challenge of the title role in The Father; this may be the understatement of the year. At least the actor ...
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Theatre in Review: Nathan the Wise (Classic Stage Company)
In 1767, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was assigned to be an in-house critic at the Hamburg National Theatre, thus making him the first dramaturg. One wishes he had subjected his drama Nathan the Wise to some of that ...
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Theatre in Review: Exit Strategy (Primary Stages/Cherry Lane Theatre)
It's appropriate that Exit Strategy is set in a public school because the script suffers from ADD and is in need of remedial help. It leaps from stark confrontations to full-on rants to shocker revelations, with only the bare ...
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Theatre in Review: Death for Five Voices (Prospect Theater Company/Sheen Center)
It was the theatre writer Ethan Mordden who coined the term "floperetta" to refer to musicals, mostly from the early- to mid-20th century, that combined rivers of melody with stilted, florid dialogue and characters right out of the wax ...
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Theatre in Review: White Rabbit Red Rabbit (Westside Theatre)
White Rabbit Red Rabbit has the most bizarre premise of the season. At the top of the show, the producers, Devlin Elliott and Tom Kirdahy, enter and introduce the evening's star -- in the case of the performance ...
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Theatre in Review: Antlia Pneumatica (Playwrights Horizons)
One doesn't watch the plays of Anne Washburn; one eavesdrops on them. Normal, straight-up exposition is not her forte; in her view, the characters' backstories are revealed on a strictly need-to-know basis. Instead, she puts the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Crucible (Walter Kerr Theatre)
A great deal has been written over the years about The Crucible, about whether it works as both historical drama and political statement, and if the implied parallel between Puritan Massachusetts and McCarthy-era Washington ...
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Theatre in Review: House Rules (Ma-Yi Theater Company/HERE)
One man's health crisis sets off shock waves among two interconnected Filipino-American families in A. Rey Pamatmat's comedy-drama. Ernie suffers what appears to be a stroke -- the script is never clear about what it is -- while in ...
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Theatre in Review: Stupid F---ing Bird (Pearl Theatre Company)
"Black is slimming," says Mash, dismissively, at the beginning of Aaron Posner's new play, which is "sort of" adapted from The Seagull. Mash is the equivalent of Chekhov's Masha, and yes, she does get around to admitting that ...
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Theatre in Review: Wrestling Jerusalem (59E59)
"It's complicated." Aaron Davidman's opening line gets a substantial, knowing laugh from audience members who have come to see his piece about the ever-confounding issue of Israel and the Arabs. Making a point that hardly needs ...
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Theatre in Review: The Effect (Barrow Street Theatre)
A new antidepressant is subjected to human trials in The Effect, a play that suffers from a few mood swings of its own. The playwright, Lucy Prebble, zooms in on two people who have agreed to spend several weeks in an ...
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Theatre in Review: Locusts Have No King (INTAR)
Locusts Have No King begins with Marcus quoting a passage from the Book of Mark, the one about how it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. There is a blackout, and the ...
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Theatre in Review: Head of Passes (The Public Theater)
The more we get to know Tarell Alvin McCraney, the more elusive this young playwright (and sometime director) seems to be. He displayed a certain talent for poetry and theatricality in Wig Out!, about drag queens in Harlem, ...
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Theatre in Review: Bright Star (Cort Theatre)
If you're going to hang an entire show on a single major plot twist, you had better tend to it carefully; otherwise you're going to give away the whole game. That's the main problem with Bright Star; the new musical, which ...
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Theatre in Review: Ironbound (Women's Project/Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
Marin Ireland is the iron woman at the center of Ironbound: As Darja, a Polish immigrant who spends most of her life in America at or below the poverty line, she displays a flinty independence and wicked wit that are ...
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Theatre in Review: Wolf in the River (The Flea Theater)
I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Wolf in the River is the dirtiest show in town. Not the most pornographic -- although a case could be made -- but the most covered in the soil of the earth. The interior of ...
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Theatre in Review: She Loves Me (Roundabout Theatre Company/Studio 54)
Actors with a gift for high-style sophisticated comedy are worth their weight in gold and, in its revival of She Loves Me, Roundabout has struck the mother lode with Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi. Cast as ...
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Theatre in Review: YOUARENOWHERE (3-Legged Dog/The Tank)
This may be the shortest review I've ever written: Between what I comprehended of YOUARENOWHERE and what the producer has asked us not to reveal, there isn't much left. Andrew Schneider's jittery existentialist freak ...
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