Plays

I Remember Mama

March 30, 2014

Director Jack Cummings III has not only chosen a new environment for this realistic play, he has also chosen to perform it with ten veteran actresses (who would be classified as senior citizens) playing all 23 parts, including teenage girls and boys, and all the male characters. When the audience enters the Gym at Judson the entire space has been turned into the playing area with seats in two rows around all four walls. Ten dining room sets with displays on each occupy the space, the size of a basketball court. [more]

And Baby Makes Seven

March 29, 2014

There has been renewed interest lately in the early, pre-How I Learned To Drive plays by Paul Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. First there was The Baltimore Waltz (1992) at the Underground Theater last November. Now And Baby Makes Seven from 1984 is on view in a thoughtful, detailed production by the Purpleman Theater Company, directed by Marc Stuart Weitz, at the New Ohio Theatre in the West Village. Baby's tale of a same-sex couple having a child still resonates with particular clarity nowadays. Except for the fact that this lesbian couple, Ruth and Anna (the one who's bearing the child) couldn't be married back then, the play rings true as it explores all the anxieties, humor and fantasies straining the relationship of these two women with each other and with Peter, the biological father of the child. [more]

Mothers and Sons

March 22, 2014

Tyne Daly has made it a specialty playing unsympathetic and difficult women, for example her star turns as Mama Rose in Gypsy and Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class. Now in a new McNally play, Mothers and Sons, she plays the bitter, angry, taciturn Katherine Gerard, the Andre’s mother of McNally’s earlier one act. [more]

The Cripple of Inishmaan

March 12, 2014

If you add up all the billions of intakes of dollars for all the motion pictures starring the galaxy of movie stars putting their bare, nekkid faces before Broadway audiences this season, the sum tops by far the starstruck lists of recent years. And of all these powerhouses, the face on the cover of the Cort Theatre Playbill says it all: Daniel Radcliffe. Here he is, back in New York once again to, please, once again convey to everyone who's willing for the conveyance that he is not Harry Potter. Or maybe, not just Harry Potter. And so he has gone about as far as he can go: he is, in this very play, Cripple Billy, the Cripple of Inishmaan. And he's wonderful. [more]