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David O’Hara

Alone It Stands

January 17, 2019

Breen's script, a succession of rapid-fire vignettes divided in half by an unnecessary intermission, tries to compensate for its lack of depth with imagined multitudes. According to a promotional flyer, the production's six actors portray a total of sixty-two characters. While I feel confident enough in my counting abilities to verify the former, I'll leave the latter to someone whose obsessiveness exceeds my own. That person might also have to be a little generous in regards to defining what constitutes a character. [more]

Three Small Irish Masterpieces

March 30, 2018

It’s impossible to discuss the history of modern Irish drama without reference to William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge, who, at the beginning of the last century, helped to found the National Theatre of Ireland. With "Three Small Irish Masterpieces," this literary trinity receives a heartfelt, if somewhat exaggerated, nod from the Irish Repertory Theatre, which, over the last few decades, has proven its own indispensability, too. [more]

Imperfect Love

February 7, 2018

We are never told the name of the play being rehearsed or who the characters in the play within the play are. In the second act, the performers dressed in their costumes for Gabriele’s play reveal that it is a Renaissance costume drama but we still learn nothing about it. Nothing much is revealed about Italian theater of the time though the play being rehearsed does not seem to be in the naturalistic mode of drama that was creeping into the legitimate stage in 1899. And why did the author pick that year? No clues are given. [more]

Within the Law

June 3, 2014

What is the most famous play currently running in New York that you have probably never heard of before? Bayard Veiller's Within the Law, Metropolitan Playhouse's final entry in its "Justice" season, has been filmed six times since its Broadway debut in 1912, most famously as Paid with Joan Crawford, revived once on the main stem, and still packs quite a punch. [more]