Dmitry Zvonkov

GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one’s character than one’s crime is the subtext of Marie Jones’s play Fly Me to the Moon, an entertaining and poignant black comedy which Ms. Jones also directs. When kind-hearted but financially strapped home attendants Loretta Mackey (Tara…

IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself directing mental patients in a play adapted from Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, which deals with issues…

EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another,” says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley’s outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a couple’s love in an abyss of tragedy. While hardly a simple statement, this dynamite production at 59E59 is as minimalist as it gets. The theater…

FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, AND  FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite its many shortcomings. Numerous jokes, believable dialogue, likeable characters, fun physical humor, and a soundtrack and popular video images from the 1980’s all make for an amusing…

LIKE KISSING AN ASHTRAY The chirpy puppet-style musical is no longer a novelty but a genre; shows with lyric-dense, upbeat, simple-rhyme songs performed in rapid-fire succession are the 21st century’s light opera.  The Last Smoker in America may have personalized the genre a bit by including the framework of a sitcom, but Bill Russell’s book reads…

HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin’s new play Final Analysis, came out onto the stage dressed in full tails (lovely costumes by Jenny Green) and, with a bemused yet somewhat foreboding grin, delivered the admonitions…

RICE MILK Vassily Sigarev’s powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local yokels, wait for a train to take them back to the capital. While there, they encounter various denizens from the area, including an…

FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the review of Vincent Gogliormella’s Whatta Ya Nuts!, directed by Charles Messina, in a nutshell: “Script bad, directing bad, show bad. Next!” Except for a couple of…

FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell’s play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant young scientist, assembles and brings to life what he hopes will be a beautiful creation, only to have it turn out a grotesque and hideous creature (John Zdrojeski in a…

HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of rotted old jokes, and collecteth he from it pieces of spoilt ideas, which were so far past their expiration date that they no…

THE GOOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER Watching The Amoralists’ production of Derek Ahonen’s entertaining new play The Bad and The Better, an image comes to mind of a virtuoso juggling act, with Mr. Ahonen and director Daniel Aukin keeping 26 actors, over 30 characters, and an extraordinary number of plot lines in the air…

MORE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS When making a show consisting of several short plays about the disabled, one must be concerned, it seems, with the possibility of the whole thing becoming more about message than art. It’s unlikely under such circumstance that, for example, a disabled character, say a wheelchair-bound girl,…

THREE’S COMPANY ON SHROOMS The concept of David Adjmi’s flawed but entertaining new play 3C is an intriguing one: to take Three’s Company, an iconic, milquetoast ABC sitcom (which starred John Ritter and ran from 1977 to 1984), and subvert it, removing the innocuous, bourgeois-TV-show veil, and turning its characters and themes on their heads….

THEATER NOIR: STYLE VS. SUBTEXT Supreme command of stagecraft is evident in every aspect of Somerled Charitable Foundation’s production of Jim Henry’s initially riveting but ultimately unsatisfying new play, the noirish psychological thriller 7th Monarch. In general, the first act has so much style and focus that one becomes hopeful for the second act to…

THIS IS LIFETIME TV AS THEATER In Megan Hart’s first full-length play This is Fiction, Amy (Aubyn Philanbaum) is on the verge of signing the contract to publish her first book when she panics and runs out of her publisher’s office. After a brief encounter with likable young school teacher Ed (Bernardo Cubrí­a), she rushes…

THE VANYA EXPERIMENT The wunderkinds of American theater, Annie Baker and Sam Gold, ages 31 and 34 respectively, follow up their earlier collaborations, among them Ms. Baker’s remarkably successful Circle Mirror Transformation, with another innovative production, this time of Chekhov’s classic Uncle Vanya (adapted by Ms. Baker, with Mr. Gold directing). The goal of Ms….

DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; knowing the playwright’s intentions to be dishonest (in that he’s serving up propaganda as art), one feels foolish being affected emotionally, as though…

THEATER AS A COLLECTIVE DREAM The band is already playing, the show underway, as we enter The Kitchen Theatre by way of the stage, which is set up like the parlor of a mystic or a fortuneteller, full of old books and odd, antiquated objects. As we take our seats we are offered wine from…

CHILDREN OF HOPE AND SORROW We enter the theater, which has been configured thrust-style like an amphitheater, and take our seats. The tiny stage below has an unfinished cement floor, a small wooden desk with a chair behind it, and two more chairs, one plain and one with a tablet arm. Behind them is a…

THE HOUSE OF LOVE AND MUSIC Many artists, being generally unsuited for life in normal society, have often dreamed of a place where they could be with others of their ilk. Where they would be free to live and create without the sinewy hand of mediocrity shackling them with public morals and conventions. A place…