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  Theatre in Review: Wine in the Wilderness (Classic Stage Company)
The strange case of Alice Childress continues to be a scandal of major proportions. Not nearly celebrated enough in her own time, she was promptly forgotten after her 1984 death. Yet, since 2021, each new Childress revival has ...
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Theatre in Review: Maybe Tomorrow (Abingdon Theatre Company at ART/New York Theatres)
Maybe Tomorrow is the first play I've seen set entirely in a bathroom; this is not likely the birth of a genre. It's a rather luxurious bathroom, surprisingly so, since it is attached to a mobile home. (A "deluxe" one, we are ...
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Theatre in Review: Vanya (Lucille Lortel Theatre)
It's the pauses that are so telling in Andrew Scott's solo version of the Anton Chekhov classic. To be sure, the actor does many things spectacularly in Sam Yates' production: He crosses behind the freestanding door ...
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Theatre in Review: We Had a World (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)
In We Had a World, playwright Joshua Harmon acts as a cartographer, mapping out the complex landscape of love and resentment that shaped his youth. The play is founded on two indisputable facts, communicated by Harmon's ...
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Theatre in Review: Amerikin (Primary Stages/59E59)
The playwright Chisa Hutchinson, who is Black, does a very nervy thing in Amerikin, imagining life in a Maryland town teeming with white supremacists. And, until she loses control of her material in the second act, she ...
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Theatre in Review: Ghosts (Lincoln Center Theatre/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
The acting in this revival of Henrik Ibsen's famously thorny play is often good enough to make one forget the fuzzy production concept framing it. Director Jack O'Brien is bent on pulling Ghosts -- its plot ...
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Theatre in Review: Last Call (New World Stages)
If nothing else, Last Call is a chance to meet two outstanding women of the German theatre. The director Gil Mehmert opted to cast the male lead characters of Peter Danish's play with actresses, a gambit that, ...
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Theatre in Review: A Streetcar Named Desire (Almeida Theatre at Brooklyn Academy of Music)
Having seen Rebecca Frecknall's revival of the Tennessee Williams classic, two thoughts come to mind: 1) Patsy Ferran is a memorable (maybe even a great) Blanche DuBois, and 2) it's time for directors to turn off the ...
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Theatre in Review: Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
By the end of Michael Walek's new play, I'm not sure we have met Jane Goodall, for the very good reason that she often is sidelined in the vehicle bearing her name. Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? is ...
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Theatre in Review: Platinum Dreams (The York Theatre/The Theatre at St. Jean)
Platinum Dreams is part of York's New2NY series of debut works but, thanks to its long and checkered history, it could be part of the company's Musicals in Mufti series, which focuses on also-rans from the past. Indeed, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) (Soho Rep)
If you were worried that in moving to 42nd Street and sharing digs with Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep had gone "uptown," I offer the example of The Great Privation (How to flip tent cents into a dollar): It's a time ...
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Theatre in Review: The Jonathan Larson Project (Orpheum Theatre)
As the new entertainment at the Orpheum begins, it's impossible not to get choked up. First, we see a video montage of various companies of Rent singing "Seasons of Love," followed by footage of playwright/composer Jonathan ...
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Theatre in Review: All Nighter (Newman Mills Theatre/Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space)
Two or three minutes of All Nighter are enough to reveal playwright Natalie Margolin's blood-curdlingly accurate ear for dialogue, at least when listening in on a quartet of seniors at a small Eastern Pennsylvania college ...
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Theatre in Review: Deep Blue Sound (Clubbed Thumb at the Public Theater)
Playwright Abe Koogler has distinguished himself in more than one way -- as a poet of the working stiff in the dramas Kill Floor and Fulfillment Center, and as an absurdist joker in last season's Staff Meal -- ...
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Theatre in Review: SUMO (Ma-Yi Theater Company/The Public Theater)
SUMO is a very, very old story wrapped in a novel package; whether that is enough will be interesting to see. Playwright Lisa Sanaye Dring invites us into the world of Japanese wrestling, which most audience members ...
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Theatre in Review: The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics (INTAR/Radio Drama Network)
The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics unfolds in the mythical Latin American land of Buenos Cruces, Spanish for "good meetings." Irony alert: Buenos Cruces is a staging ground for sorcery, ghosts, revolutions, and capitalism ...
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Theatre in Review: Conversations with Mother (Theatre 555)
If it's 1984 and you're tending bar at a gay bar called The Meat Hook and your mother calls you at work, it's safe to say you have a problem. So it is with Bobby, the male lead in Matthew Lombardo's new play, locked in an invasive, ...
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Theatre in Review: Exiles (The MAP Theatre at ART/New York Theatres)
We can all agree, I think, that James Joyce was not natively a playwright, and not just because Exiles, his only dramatic work, languished for decades after it was first published in 1918. (It was rejected by the Abbey ...
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Theatre in Review: Dakar 2000 (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
Dakar 2000 is populated by two of the nicest, most likable people you wouldn't trust with a paper clip, let alone your life, and the considerable fun of Rajiv Joseph's new thriller involves trying to figure out what, ...
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Theatre in Review: On the Evolutionary Function... (Second Stage, Pershing Square Signature Center)
The title of D. A. Mindell's play, On the Evolutionary Function of Shame, is an act of misdirection; shame is the least of it. The real problem eating at everyone here is the pursuit of knowledge that comes with ...
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