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  Theatre in Review: The Dinosaurs (Playwrights Horizons)
The Dinosaurs is a stealth piece of writing, a brief (yet surprisingly detailed) play that begins on a confounding note yet quietly exerts a grip that won't be denied. The playwright Jacob Perkins, focusing on the all ...
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Theatre in Review: Hate Radio (St. Ann's Warehouse)
Hate Radio is so far off the map of normal New York theatre that it is almost impossible to describe. So many of the allegedly political works that we get these days involve first-person accounts of personal struggles ...
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Theatre in Review: The Other Place (National Theatre/The Shed)
The Other Place unfolds in an unfinished room, an appropriate setting for a play that remains oddly hesitant in realizing its dark conclusions. We're in the longtime family home of Chris, the unbending protagonist, and it is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Unknown (Studio Seaview)
Among creators of solo shows, David Cale is the greatest yarn-spinner, hooking us with a knack for generating suspense and surprise. If he wrote books, they would be called page-turners. The Unknown may be his most ...
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Theatre in Review: Not Nobody (Twilight Theatre Company/59E59)
The preshow music for Not Nobody includes "This is Not America," by David Bowie and Pat Metheny; it's a smart choice by sound designer Ariana Cardoza for a play that wrestles with an American justice system that, in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Monsters (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)
The Monsters offers one of the great pleasures of the theatre, namely the opportunity to see a character transformed in full audience view. At one point in Ngozi Anyanwu's time-jumping new play, about siblings ...
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Theatre in Review: Blackout Songs (The Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater/Robert W. Wilson MCC Theatre)
In Blackout Songs, love and addiction are so inextricably linked that they come to seem like the same thing. The play, by Joe White -- well-known in the UK, less so here -- throws together a young couple at an AA ...
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Theatre in Review: Data (Lucille Lortel Theatre)
"Data is the language of our time. And like all languages, its narratives will be written by the victors." This statement, meant to reassure, is one of the most chilling in this new thriller, and that's saying something. It is delivered ...
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Theatre in Review: Watch Me Walk (Soho Rep/Peter Jay Sharp Theatre)
Anne Gridley is one angry woman. To be sure, she has plenty to be mad about; at times during this autobiographical piece, part of the Under the Radar Festival, I felt that a better title for Watch Me Walk might be I ...
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Theatre in Review: Ulysses (Elevator Repair Service/The Public Theater)
At the beginning of Elevator Repair Service's latest piece, presented as part of the Under the Radar Festival, Scott Shepherd enters and says, "Hello, and welcome to Ulysses. Get ready." Ready for what? In this case, the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Bookstore (New Jersey Repertory Company/59E59)
The weather outside is frightful. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. What better time for a little civilized amusement? For fast relief, try The Bookstore, a low-key yet beguiling tale of literary life among ...
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Theatre in Review: Bellow (Irish Arts Center/Under the Radar)
Bellow is a tricky one, all right. Ostensibly a celebration of Irish folk music, as played on the accordion by the musician Danny O'Mahony, it is, apparently, exactly the kind of show one expects from the Irish Arts ...
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Theatre in Review: The Disappear (Audible Theater at Minetta Lane Theatre)
Erica Schmidt, writer and director of The Disappear, includes a Cassandra-like warning in the script's explanatory notes; too bad that nobody has heeded it. It's about her protagonist, Benjamin Braxton, a fiftyish ...
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Theatre in Review: Bug (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
When I first saw Bug about twenty years ago, I found it a creepily effective but distasteful exploitation thriller, the stage equivalent of a Blumhouse horror film -- the kind released in early January for a quick buck. I ...
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Theatre in Review: Juxtapose: A Theatrical Shadow Box (Happenstance Theater/59E59)
Near the end of its eighty-minute running time, Juxtapose finds its feet, quite literally: Four cast members, male and female, none of them obviously trained in dance or in the first flush of youth, appear, sporting ...
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Theatre in Review: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Greenwich House Theater)
Of all the properties, literary or cinematic, that one might adapt to the musical stage, Picnic at Hanging Rock is among the strangest. Joan Lindsay's novel, published in 1967, is a classic of Australian literature. Peter ...
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Theatre in Review: Night Stories (The Wild Project)
If you've overdosed on holiday cheer and are of a literary turn of mind, you could do worse than Night Stories, a collection of pieces by the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever. It is a full immersion in the dark side of the ...
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Theatre in Review: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Greenwich House Theater)
Of all the properties, literary or cinematic, that one might adapt to the musical stage, Picnic at Hanging Rock is among the strangest. Joan Lindsay's novel, published in 1967, is a classic of Australian literature. Peter ...
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Theatre in Review: Night Stories (The Wild Project)
If you've overdosed on holiday cheer and are of a literary turn of mind, you could do worse than Night Stories, a collection of pieces by the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever. It is a full immersion in the dark side of ...
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Theatre in Review: Tartuffe (New York Theatre Workshop)
Venues create expectations: If New York Theatre Workshop is going to stage a Moliere classic, one quite reasonably expects something wild, even shocking. This is, after all, the company that presented Ivo van Hove's version of Th ...
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