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Joan Kane

Flo

April 16, 2026

The show’s titular character, Flo Weinberg, is a wheelchair-bound Upper West Side resident who decides to make a deal with Satan – in exchange for her soul, she can have fame, wealth, and happiness. The final part, happiness, proves to be a difficult sticking point, and the two bicker over what happiness exactly means and how one achieves it. Toby Armour’s ("Freedom Summer," "Meltdown") script is wickedly clever, full of recurring jokes and fascinating religious themes. There’s an undercurrent of gnosticism to the play’s narrative, one that works impressively well with the show’s tone. "Flo" is a comedy at heart, but one that engages seriously with larger ideas even as it commits to being quite wacky. [more]

Remembrance

March 30, 2025

"Remembrance" by Patricia GoodSon is a story about her journey, for more than a decade, in dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's disease. As directed by Joan Kane, it is told from the perspective of a woman working with a therapist to unravel the emotional impact of those years of caregiving. It is not about the impact of the disease on the person with it but on the effect on the caregiver. [more]

Freedom Summer

June 15, 2023

"Freedom Summer," written by Toby Armour and directed by Joan Kane, is a semi-autobiographical story of the playwright's experiences that summer as one of those students risking their lives in the cause of racial justice. It is an important story in the present time as the same "Jim Crow" racist attitudes that controlled the social and political structures of Mississippi in 1964 have come out of the shadows in an effort to restore the white supremacist mechanisms of voter suppression and control. Unfortunately, this play does not deliver the drumbeat of tension that a deeply felt sense of fear, bordering on terror, engenders. That type of feeling was experienced by the participants that summer. Sadly, this production does not well serve that critical, timely subject matter. [more]

Sycorax, Cyber Queen of Qamara

November 5, 2018

Delightfully growling in a quasi-Middle Eastern accent, her head encased in a babushka, plastered with makeup, wearing a flowing robe and hobbling on a cane, Sandra Bargman is terrific as the title character and anchor of "Sycorax, Cyber Queen of Qamara." It’s playwright Fengar Gael’s cheeky fantasia that tells of this unseen witch from William Shakespeare’s "The Tempest." [more]

I Know What Boys Want

July 23, 2015

A very powerful and topical theme runs though Penny Jackson’s play, "I Know What Boys Want," but the author’s understandable anger leads to a good deal of melodrama. Tackling the topics of cyberbullying, sexual double standards, and misuse and abuse of the social media are timely and provocative themes and deeply in need of public discussion. However, the play also takes on the topics of drug addiction, teenage drinking, same-sex marriage, date rape, effects of divorce on teenagers, SAT tutoring for rich kids, etc. While the basic story is absorbing, I Know What Boys Want tries to cover a few too many topics in its 90 minutes. [more]

Copyright Jack Quinn, 2001-2026