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  Theatre in Review: The Gin Game (Golden Theatre)
James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson are giving such confident, entertaining performances at the Golden these nights, not until very late does it becomes apparent that they are not really playing The Gin Game. Each ...
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Theatre in Review: Student Body (The Flea Theater)
It's a Friday night in winter, during finals, at a small college in the middle of nowhere. A snowstorm threatens. Ten friends meet on the stage of the school's theatre, where the set for the next production is only partly built. The stage ...
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Theatre in Review: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (One Year Lease Theater Company/59E59)
It's probably safe to say that you've never before seen a play narrated by a smartphone, a gap that is now neatly filled by Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. In addition to its storytelling function, the phone, an Android, is ...
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Theatre in Review: Fool for Love (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
The Furies are unleashed in a rundown desert motel in Fool for Love, aided and abetted by the stunning performances of Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell. The seedy, barely furnished room -- a solid achievement by the ...
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Theatre in Review: Barbecue (The Public Theater)
You don't really need to know my problems, but it was just a little while ago that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria had many in the theatre press scratching their heads, trying to figure out exactly what could be revealed about a play ...
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Theatre in Review: Sisters' Follies: Between Two Worlds (Abrons Arts Center)
Just about every theatre of a certain age claims to have a ghost -- and why not? When you think of all the emotional energy spent in such spaces down the years, it would be more surprising if they weren't somehow haunted. (I even know ...
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Theatre in Review: Old Times (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
Memory is both a weapon and a trap in Harold Pinter's Old Times, which is being presented in a production that, paradoxically, both supports and sabotages the author's enigmatic, yet highly dramatic, text. The good news first ...
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Theatre in Review: Cloud Nine (Atlantic Theater Company)
How is it that New York has not seen Cloud Nine in more than 30 years? It was an Off Broadway blockbuster, running 971 performances in the early 1980s, establishing Caryl Churchill as a playwright to contend with it, ...
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Theatre in Review: Fondly, Collette Richland (Elevator Repair Service/New York Theatre Workshop)
Not too far into the first act of Fondly, Collette Richland, the actor Greig Sargeant looks out at the audience and exclaims, "I can't understand a single thing that is happening!"
"You and me both," snarled a male voice ...
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Theatre in Review: The Quare Land (Irish Repertory Theatre)
You will look long and hard before you find a protagonist as determinedly eccentric as Hugh Pugh in John McManus' new play; when we first meet the cranky nonagenarian, he is in the bathtub, up to his neck in bubbles, listening to ...
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Theatre in Review: Catch the Butcher (Cherry Lane Theatre Studio)
Ever wonder what serial killers are like at home? Here comes Catch the Butcher to tell you all about domestic life with a husband who has dispatched nearly a dozen women in his lead-lined, soundproofed basement. Give ...
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Theatre in Review: Daddy Long Legs (Davenport Theatre)
Clearly, Paul Gordon has a thing about orphans. The composer-lyricist's resume includes the 2000 Broadway musical Jane Eyre, featuring one of the most benighted (and parentless) heroines in nineteenth-century literature, and < ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gray Man (Pipeline Theatre Company)
These are the elements that make up Andrew Farmer's new play: An eerie lullaby about a little girl who is carried away into the woods, where she dies. A pair of women, bearing lanterns in the darkness and frightening unseen children ...
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Theatre in Review: Spring Awakening (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
Since the new production of Spring Awakening has been brought to Broadway by the Deaf West Theatre Company, it is fitting that many of its most telling moments unfold in silence -- or nearly so. As a matron uncomfortably ...
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Theatre in Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Pearl Theatre Company/Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival)
Welcome to the age of Downsized Shakespeare. The idea is afoot these days, in many of the better theatres, that you don't need all that pageantry and all those extras to do one of the Bard's works; half a dozen actors will do nicely, thank ...
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Theatre in Review: Fulfillment (The Flea Theater)
Thomas Bradshaw's career as a playwright has depended so much on shock value that one might be forgiven for thinking that "provocateur" is his first name. Still, it's surprising to see how, well, sedate his work is getting. I'm ...
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Theatre in Review: How to Live on Earth (Colt Coeur/HERE)
The characters in How to Live on Earth want to be sent to Mars, never to return, and, having spent 90 minutes with them, I heartily endorse the plan. The playwright, MJ Kaufman, posits a countrywide search for ...
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Theatre in Review: The New Morality (Mint Theater Company)
The program notes for The New Morality call it a "tempest-in-a-teapot" comedy. I'm afraid that the tempest is barely a squall and the tea is exceptionally weak.
We live in an age that no longer believes in light comedy's ...
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Theatre in Review: The Christians (Playwrights Horizons)
In Lucas Hnath's new play, a pastor preaches a sermon on redemption and opens the door to a personal purgatory. Paul, the pastor, has every reason to consider his life blessed. Standing in his sumptuous sanctuary, backed by an ...
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Theatre in Review: Hamlet in Bed (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
The minute he steps on a stage, Michael Laurence sends out a powerful force field of neurosis; he's a walking double bind, sending a white-hot mixed message that screams "Don't look at me; no, look at me!" With his lean, lanky frame ...
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