Alexander Harrington

THE RETURN OF JOHN GUARE, WITH MIXED RESULTS High expectations lead inevitably to disappointment while low expectations often lead to pleasant surprises. Â  Having read Ben Brantley’s drubbing of A Free Man Of Color, John Guare’s historical comedy of the Louisiana Purchase, I expected to be bored to distraction by an unfocused gumbo of a play. Â …

MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE POND, DURING THE McCARTHY ERA When John Osborne and the lesser-known playwright/actor Anthony Creighton wrote Personal Enemy in 1953, it would have been courageous for someone living in the U.S. to caricature anti-communists as grotesque, proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual yahoos – it wouldn’t have been thoughtful or artistically interesting, but it would have…

THEATER OF DOSTOEVSKY Fyodor Dostoevsky is recognized as a psychologist, philosopher, and storyteller. His two masterpieces, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov, explore weighty philosophical questions: in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov believes himself to be an extraordinary man who is not limited by morality almost fifteen years before Nietzsche put the term übermensch (inadequately…

A LEGENDARY PLAY’S SECOND CHANCE AT BROADWAY LIFE Were David Hirson’s La Bête not  Â burdened with history, this review would simply say that Matthew Warchus’s production includes Mark Rylance’s tour de force performance of an immensely entertaining half-hour-long monologue and solid comic performances by David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette, but is one-note and overlong,…

SEPTUAGENARIAN COMEDIENNE, ADOLESCENT JOKES Joan Rivers’ energy is more entertaining than her material.   Never one for crisp, understated delivery, she gushes out her monologues, stepping on every punch line with “Oh my God :,” “Oh, oh, oh:,” half-laughs, and gagging sounds (“Can we talk, here” seems to have gone the way of the dodo).   While…