Though the premise is an interesting device for dissecting the friendship between two men--for surely many men are curious how they are perceived by their better halves (self included), the play doesn’t aim to say much otherwise. Acting choices, pacing and thematics are all appropriate thanks to Lee Sunday Evans' seamless direction, but it’s the script itself which is the production’s biggest hurdle. Though there are some interesting and engaging ideas presented regarding the mind of the male, the untidy and nondescript ending make no attempt to make any significant statement about any of it, ultimately shrouding the entire production in a veil of murky, middle-ground mediocrity. [more]
“He” and “She” are a 40ish upper middle class couple who divorced ten years earlier following the traumatic death of their young son who was hit by a car. Due to toxic waste from a nearby gas factory, 200 graves, including their son’s will have to be dug up and the remains reinterred elsewhere. This unpleasant circumstance instigates this reunion after a long estrangement at a cemetery in Holland. [more]
The actors make the characterless space come alive. Elizabeth Van Dyke (Zora Neale Hurston) shrouds Zora with the same purity and authority that she conveyed in the 1998 production. Zora never pandered to convention -- Harlem Renaissance beliefs (Langston Hughes or Richard Wright) or white America politics. Zora walked her own path and was unwaveringly true to who she was and her ideas about art, politics, men and women, academia, and Black culture. Van Dyke towering performance is one that depicts Zora's all these character traits, as well as having a vulnerability and zest for life.
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Told in real time from five to seven PM on Election Day, November 8, 2016, not much happens in the play but as the Gabriel women talk, they reveal their hopes, their fears, their desires and their memories. By the end of the play, we know everything there is to know about them. Under Nelson’s direction, his cast of six who now have played these people in three plays since February 27 (first "Hungry" and then "What Did You Expect?" which began previews on Sept. 19) are not so much acting these characters as living them. [more]
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s "The Front Page" remains the quintessential comedy about the tabloid newspaper racket. Jack O’Brien’s production plays it safe while a more brazen and outrageous style might have obtained more laughs. The current revival with its many recognizable names and faces is still entertaining fun. And it does bring back to the Broadway stage the incomparable Nathan Lane in top form in an unforgettable role. [more]
Shrouded by clear shower curtains, the actors enter the stage and bring out furniture, including a gramophone, and chat with each other. There is newsreel footage proclaiming the end of W.W. II in Great Britain. Half-baked anachronisms pile up during the next two hours and half hours. These include the intermission shtick of old-time drive-in movie announcements, “The show will start in five minutes…visit the snack bar… for buttered popcorn.” [more]
"Sweat," which won the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, is reputed inspired by interviews conducted by playwright Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey in Reading, Pennsylvania, named the poorest city in America in 2011. By 2007, Reading had seen its factories and mills closing as NAFTA and globalization made it cheaper to produce goods in Mexico or China, without offering its residents anything but unemployment insurance. The play could probably have taken place in one of a dozen places in the Rust Belt. "Sweat"’s main characters are all eventually affected by this downward trend in a community that has few opportunities. [more]
Just as Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower did centuries later, Coriolanus, urged on by his powerful mother, Volumnia (a startling, stinging Lisa Harrow), uses his military success as a springboard for a high political office, Consul, which he easily wins with help of two Tribunes of Rome, Sicinius Velutus (a wily Stephen Spinella) and Junius Brutus (Merritt Janson, playing cross gender to perfection) and a friend, Menenius Agrippa (Patrick Page, using his weighty voice and commanding eyes brilliantly). [more]
The pomposity of the Tony Kushner-style title extends to naming its leading characters “The Academic” and “The Writer.” They’re two gay men in their late 20’s and the play charts their meeting, relationship, breakup and aftermath. This is accomplished by a dizzying structure of non-linear, rapid-fire, time shifting brief scenes. This intrusive device undercuts emotional involvement with the couple, as all of the jumping around of the narrative becomes artificial, repetitious and uninvolving. The period covered ranges from 2006 to 2011. [more]
Focusing on a group of roughly fifteen regulars that attend the homeless shelter in question, the play is a series of intimate and telling conversations between homeless people of all different walks of life--and their myriad ways of ending up in their current position. Playwright Zeiger, who is also founder and artistic director of producing company The Platform Group, plays Diana, a recovering addict and recent widow who is constantly struggling with staying clean. Playing a woman who is broken and beaten down, Zeiger’s familiarity with the script gives her performance an authenticity which is truly garnering of sympathy. Joanie Anderson plays a community college student named Melissa, who sleeps on the subway and desperately wants to better herself but just can’t seem to break the cycle. [more]
Josie Rourke, artisic director of the Donmar Warehouse, understands the game’s complexity and what adroit moves need to be made throughout to maintain a psychological cohesiveness. Her deft hand is evident in her light touch so that the production is not weighed down by nastiness. Where Rourke falls down is casting Schreiber, who is known for his charismatic masculinity and not for being a jocund bon vivant. Valmont needs to be more calculating, as well as, effete. [more]
Not only does Nguyen have a unique sensibility and style, but the story is told entirely from the Vietnamese-American point of view, one not often seen on our stages. We hear the Americans as the Vietnamese do and as the Americans attempt to speak in Vietnamese. While the structure of the play is quite challenging going backwards and forwards in time from July 1975 in a Middle America relocation camp and breaking out in rap songs periodically, "Vietgone" is a very compelling portrait of displaced people trying to make a new life for themselves while wishing they were back home where they cannot go. [more]
"Lavender Songs: A Queer Cabaret in Weimar Berlin" has the mature and slim Mr. Lawrence in drag virtually for the entire length of the performance. In a dirty-blonde curled wig, his face garishly made up, twirling a red and purple boa, and wearing a sleeveless sequined black dress, Lawrence is like an Otto Dix painting come to life. [more]
Whether you see one or both of Gurney’s "Two Class Acts," these are provocative plays of ideas on topics of the day. The playwright continues to demonstrate that he has a wise and discerning view of the human condition. Director Stafford Arima has done a beautiful job of obtaining all of the nuances and humor out of the two sharp and intelligent situations. The casting for both plays could not be improved as the actors make their roles their own. The Flea Theater leaves White Street on a high note with two entertaining and superior productions that will close the space with honor and distinction. [more]
British actor Richard Armitage making his New York stage debut and Tony and Academy Award nominee Amy Ryan work hard to make Kenneth and Sandra three-dimensional, likeable people, but, as written by Mr. Bartlett, their crassness is the fatal flaw in "Love, Love, Love." Why should we enjoy spending so much time with two people who so adroitly care only for themselves? [more]
Healy’s treatment is faithful to the novel with a good deal of it being Clegg’s narration addressed to the audience. There are lengthy conversations between Miranda and Clegg, and her escape attempts are depicted. No matter how skillful Healy’s stage version is, it’s still two hours of often-philosophical talk between two characters in an unpleasant situation. [more]
Founded in 1991, the National Asian American Theater Company’s mission is to present theater with all Asian-American casts. This is accomplished by producing classics of European and American works of dramatic literature, or adaptations of these works by Asian-American playwrights or new plays written by non-Asian Americans, not for or about Asian Americans. That last precept is the case of this East coast premiere of "Sagittarius Ponderosa." [more]
Benjamin Stuber’s puppetry designs are a disappointment and should be more thoughtful and complementary to the play. Ghoulish puppets that are meant to disturb seem make-shift and thrown together. There is only one disturbing and appropriately quirky puppet effect – the appearance of a huge eye, set into a collage background of assorted textiles. [more]
In his Broadway productions, David Leveaux has often used a strong directorial concept such as his Chekhovian 'Fiddler on the Roof" and his interracial "Romeo and Juliet" which did not work for all theatergoers. Here he seems to have decided that Susan finds life in Britain gray on her return and all of the sets by Mike Britton other than the final one (ironically suggesting the hope of the post-war generation) are made up of gray walls. As a result, none of them have any atmosphere aside from all resembling each other. It is left to the costumes by Jess Goldstein to give clues to the year of each scene which they sometimes do, and sometimes not. [more]
Company XIV has applied its inimitable Baroque-Burlesque style to the Greek myth of the Judgement of Paris for the second time and come up with Paris, an exotic and erotic adults-only entertainment that is like nothing else you will see this year. Conceived, directed and choreographed from the fevered imagination of Austin McCormick, Paris combines the arts of dance, opera, circus, theater, storytelling and high fashion to tell its story of the competition between the goddesses Athena, Juno and Venus for the Golden Apple. As you may know, the future outcome was eventually The Trojan War. [more]
The play is both satiric and trenchant. The conversations of the men are laced with profanity much like David Mamet’s real estate men in Glengarry Glen Ross. Eliza is called everything in the book (arrogant, aggressive, disrespectful, impatient, a loose cannon) as well as names you can’t print in a family newspaper. Eventually it rubs off on Eliza and Janice and they are cursing as crudely as the men: if you can’t beat them at their own game, then join them. The men’s fear of the women getting ahead would be pathetic if it weren’t so typical and true. Rebeck dramatizes office politics as each member of the staff worries about his or her own skin, either with lies, evasions or manipulation, and the circle keeps widening, until Eliza beats them at their own game. [more]
Pierce coolly addresses the audience while delivering this mundane litany. His superb comic timing, long evident on the television situation comedy "Frasier," is on glorious display here. That quality combined with his dramatic depth and soothingly funny delivery makes this opening sequence mesmerizing. [more]
Directed by high profile new British director Simon Godwin, associate director of the U.K.’s National Theatre, making his New York debut, this "Cherry Orchard" seems to have no interpretation or explanation for a new staging. Stephen Karam, the author of last season’s acclaimed "The Humans," has written a new version which seems to be heavy on American ideas in this Russian play, while both the sets and costume designs get in the way of coherence and understanding. All in all this is a great disappointment considering the talent involved. [more]
British author Stephen Sharkey’s new translation is faithful to Brecht, but the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble has fashioned the presentation as an old-time radio show. Brecht was known for his self-conscious style of distancing and alienation, where the audience is made aware that they are watching a play but this additional device is a distraction and not as funny as intended. [more]
While S. N. Behrman was one of the leading Broadway playwrights from the twenties through the early sixties, he went into an eclipse after his death in 1973. Since 2000, however, there have been New York revivals of his major comedies "The Second Man," "Biography," "No Time for Comedy" and "Rain from Heaven." Set in the living room of a summer cottage on an estate in Northern Maine where the rich Frothinghams go to get away from the problems of the world, circa 1936, End of Summer resembles Chekhov’s "The Cherry Orchard" in that they both concern wealthy people refusing to recognize the changing social order. However, S. N. Behrman’s play is very much a comedy with its cool, urbane witticisms and very American in its outlook and content. [more]
Simon Stephens, whose Tony Award winning "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" recently amazed audiences with its razor-sharp take on the inner workings of an autistic boy, is back with "Heisenberg," a two-hander that examines the relationship between a forty-something woman and a seventy-something man, written with the same consummate insight into the foibles of human beings, minus that play’s technical wizardry, here replaced by a sharp ear and eye for the nuances of neediness. [more]
In the guise of two old Upper West Side bachelor geezers, Kroll as failed actor, Gil Faizon, and Mulaney as failed writer, George St. Geegland, wander about Pask’s brilliant combination apartment/beauty salon/TV studio/street set, musing out loud about their lives, wearing dreadful wigs (credit Leah Loukas) and speaking in a bizarre accent which, for example, turns “Broadway” into “broodway,” “an” into “en” and “homage” into “home page.” [more]
Visual artist and puppeteer Jessica Scott navigates through a satiric and fascinating new media “seascape” with a dysfunctional ship’s crew, albeit all women. Scott’s "Ship of Fools" uses nightmare structure, intentionally drawing from Book VI of Plato’s "Republic" (from whence its title came), Bosch imagery and other surreal allegories, depicting the fine line between heroines and madness. [more]
In "The God Projekt," the “Divine He” repeatedly tries to make reparations for his past destructive deeds, but to no avail. God is wrestling with dementia and in a time loop. Yet, he is determined to correct, well, his god-awful mistakes -- one of which is not only acknowledging the “Divine She” in his heavenly order, but atoning for a heinous crime against her. [more]
Obie award-winning playwright José Rivera is an Oscar nominee for his adapted screenplay for "The Motorcycle Diaries." For this adaptation, he has set "The Maids" (which premiered in Paris in 1947) in Vieques Island in Puerto Rico in 1941. This was a politically tumultuous era with native factions resisting the U.S. presence there. Mr. Rivera’s script reflects this situation and locale and is filled with cultural references to sugar cane, bustellos and revolutionaries. [more]
The scenic design by Brett Banakis is a functional, minimalist configuration of a slightly raised wooden performance platform surrounded by a wooden frame dotted with small antlers suggesting the pub. There’s an assemblage of vintage furniture, potted plants, screens and vines that are shifted about to designate the various locations. This all contributes to a deficit of visual grandeur that the production is understandably striving for on a limited budget but doesn’t achieve. These design flaws could be superseded by an abundance of bravura performances, but there aren’t. [more]
Ibsen’s "An Enemy of the People" is a classic of modern drama but at times it can seem musty in a poor translation. David Harrower’s "Public Enemy" is not only a shrewd, accessible adaptation, it also makes clear the contemporary relevance of the dangers of the herd instinct in a seemingly just society. The Pearl Theatre Company production is a must-see for all good citizens, particularly in these perilous times. [more]
Playwright Helen Edmundson whose stage plays have been mostly adaptations of famous literature ("The Mill on the Floss," "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," as well as "Coram Boy" and "Thérèse Raquin" both seen on Broadway) tells her story in the leisurely way one might write a novel. While the material is both shocking and surprising, director Pamela Moller Kareman has undercut the inherent tension in the play by the choices she has made. [more]
