Ben and Max Ringham Archives - TheaterScene.net

Ben and Max Ringham

Prima Facie

May 1, 2023

The mesmerizing Jodie Comer, making her Broadway debut in the Olivier Award-winning best new play after starring in the genre-subverting BBC show Killing Eve, portrays Tessa (for which Comer also won an Olivier in her West End bow) with stunning fidelity to the pain she causes and endures. While the tension between these two aspects of Tessa's personal history eventually ignite a fervent reassessment of who she has been, who she is now, and who she should be, Comer never gets ahead of herself in the performance. Early on, as Tessa recounts, in predatory terms, conducting a cross-examination that frees a rapist, Comer convinces us, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Tessa not only perceives practicing law as a "game" but also is emotionless about the outcome, no matter the consequences for others. At this point, in hearing Tessa trumpet her job so blithely, the horror is ours alone, because, for Tessa, everything she's saying is just another day at the office. [more]

Cyrano de Bergerac

April 19, 2022

Playwright Martin Crimp, an adherent of the ”in-yer-face” school of British playwriting, has taken Edmond Rostand’s turn-of-the-last century verse drama, Cyrano de Bergerac, and not only blown off the cobwebs but exploded it into an entirely new 21st century experience. Staged by innovative director Jamie Lloyd, it has become a showcase for titanic Scottish stage and screen actor James McAvoy making an unforgettable New York stage debut in the title role as the 17th century poet and soldier. [more]

Blindness

June 9, 2021

Read by unseen British stage star Juliet Stevenson, "Blindness" is as timely as Albert Camus’ "The Plague" with its story of an epidemic which affects first a community, then a city and finally an entire country. With the audience sitting in socially distanced pods of two, and listening on binaural headphones, the space has been equipped with bars of light both horizontal and vertical which turn either red, green, amber, blue or white and are raised and lowered at various times. However, since the story takes place in a city in which the inhabitants are struck blind, much of the play is performed in total darkness. [more]