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Ben Philipp

Pride House

January 23, 2024

While “Pride” has come to stand for Gay Liberation in contemporary times, Beatrice has named her house after Jane Austen’s novel as it is made clear when she names her new guesthouse “Prejudice” at the end of the play. The play’s cast of characters includes mostly real people under their own names: John Mosher, film critic for The New Yorker Magazine; Arthur Brill, decorator and furniture designer; Natalia Danesi Murray, a Broadway actress and later journalist and editor; and Edwin Marshall, an African American dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies. Unfortunately, neither the play nor the program makes it clear that these were all real people or that they were well known in their time. The play also does a certain amount of name dropping (Eva Le Gallienne, Gypsy Rose Lee, Janet Flanner) that may go over the heads of many of the younger theatergoers today. [more]

On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning

September 15, 2022

Revived by Retro Productions, we are treated to Eric Overmyer’s alternative Victorian fantasy, "On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning," that takes three vibrant, independent women of 1888 on an expedition not just through deepest, darkest “terra incognita” but also forward 67 years into a very different America.  Mores, as well as language as they know it, are at risk. [more]