Dmitry Zvonkov

A LESSON IN CHARACTERIZATION Carol Kane’s magnetic performance turns Craig Lucas’s dramatically thin comic thriller The Lying Lesson into compelling entertainment. Ms. Kane plays Bette Davis (the movie star, in her November years), who arrives incognito to an empty house in Maine that she is the process of purchasing, a couple of days prior to…

A DULL DESCENT INTO HELL The charisma and passion Ethan Hawke brings to the title role, Vincent D’Onofrio’s powerful stage presence, a gnarly set by Derek McLane, lovely songs by Latham and Shelby Gains, and evocative lighting (Jeff Croiter), sound (Shane Rettig) and costumes (Cathrine Zuber) all fail to save Jonathan Marc Sherman’s new play,…

FUNNY CONVERSATIONS ABOUT DEATH Hamish Linklater’s very funny, sharp and tender new play The Vandal begins on a cold winter night as a down-on-her-luck middle-aged woman waits for a bus on a deserted street. A skinny high-school boy appears and starts up a conversation. Precocious and lively, he quickly overcomes the woman’s reluctance to participate….

THE ANTICHRIST IN A COLLEGE DORM The Amoralists’ staging of Lyle Kessler’s new play Collision, directed by David Fofi, is an admirable but flawed effort to explore the motivations of a young white middle-class cult leader and his followers. Featuring dialogue packed with popular philosophical notions and a main character who, in spirit at least,…

AS HARMLESS AS A PICNIC Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic is the perfect show to take your mom to. I know because I did. An excellent cast – which includes Ellen Burstyn, Mare Winningham, and Reed Birney – solid staging, topnotch stagecraft elements, and a well-crafted, thoughtful script full…

LAURIE METCALF BELONGS IN THE OTHER PLACE In The Other Place, Sharr White’s riveting and affective play, Laurie Metcalf delivers a poignant and masterfully crafted performance as Juliana, a neurologist and holder of a billion-dollar patent, whose life suddenly starts crumbing before her eyes. The show begins with her – confident, sophisticated, impregnable – lecturing…

CHEKHOV REINVENTED, SORT OF The whimsical premise behind Kristen Kosmas’ brilliantly conceived and deftly executed creation There There is this: Christopher Walken, while touring Russia in a one-man show as Solyony from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, falls off a ladder and is unable to perform. When a proofreader named Karen (the dynamite Ms. Kosmas), is urged…

I THINK I HEARD BELLINI TURNING IN HIS GRAVE Imagine yourself sitting tied to a chair in a stuffy, dark room with a very dull senile old man who talks on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about nonsense, and you have imagined the experience…

HALF & HALF Australian Made Entertainment’s new production of Andrew Bovell’s well-crafted relationship thriller Speaking in Tongues really gets going in the second act. The play, directed by Bryn Boice, tells the stories of nine individuals (played by four actors) whose lives Mr. Bovell cleverly intertwines, giving us a cross-section of problems that arise in…

DARK AND DELIGHTFUL A liberatingly surreal and exquisitely poetic masterwork, Fernando Arrabal’s Garden of Delights is a sinister fairytale that concerns itself with the inner struggles of Lais, a famous actress living in a secluded castle with only her sheep and a small, grotesque, ape-like halfwit she mostly keeps locked in a cage. Ildiko Nemeth,…

AFLOAT ON HIGH ASPIRATIONS Many positive things can and should be said about Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home, a play about a three-day cruise at the end of which the passengers participate in a secret, transformative ritual. The play is an allegory, an indictment of thoughtless first-world consumerism, as well as materialism, superficiality, and…

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new show Ich, Kí¼rbisgeist are, ironically, also its charms. Or is it vice versa? The invented language the characters speak – English with Scandinavian…

A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production of Jon Fosse’s outstanding play A Summer Day, which had the misfortune of being admired and subsequently translated and helmed…

WELL INTENTIONED, ILL-CONCEIVED Whispers of “pretentious” could be heard in the audience of Paul David Young’s new play In the Summer Pavilion, which doesn’t seem like a fair assessment. Calling a work pretentious suggests a certain lack of sincerity on the part of its creator, as if he’s more concerned with showing off his abilities…

PUT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION Anticipating having to review Owen Dunne’s new play Positions, the feeling I had while watching it  – knowing the production to have travelled 600 miles to New York City and seeing it performed on a Saturday night to a near-empty house  – was similar to that of watching a roach trying to…

AN AMUSING TRIFLE A.R. Gurney’s entertaining, dynamic but trivial new play Heresy reinvents the story of Jesus Christ (in the play he’s called Chris), changing the setting from 33 A.D. Jerusalem to America in the not-so-distant future. Jim Simpson’s solid direction, engaging performances, clever dialogue, well-articulated ideas and an abundance of jokes manage to distract…

HOW LOVE DIES: TWO VERSIONS Brian Friel’s excellent 1968 play Lovers is actually two separate plays with similar themes and settings. Both take place in a small town in Ireland in the mid 1960’s and both deal with how the hard, petty realities of life trample love’”and the excitement, sentiment and hope that come with…

NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’s dilapidated house, which is one of three Williams one-acts in Something Wild…, presented by Pook’s Hill, with Ken Schatz directing. Ms. Frazer’s piercing portrayal, so tender…

THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it’s difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics can be an unwieldy proposition. This show however, with its incontestable agenda and elegant, straightforward execution, is a brilliant exception. Twenty years ago…