Dmitry Zvonkov

NOTHING IF NOT INTENSE The night their shelter burns down, two homeless Iraqi war veterans, Horace and Alicia, both suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are given vouchers to stay the night in a seedy motel, where they are menaced by past horrors and villains from the present. Such is the premise of Charles Fuller’s…

TWO PLAYS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE Many plays begin comically and end in tragedy. Rarely though does the trajectory go in the other direction, as it does with Fredrik Brattberg’s fascinating, multi-layered work The Returning, one half of a double bill, Norway Plays: Drama Beyond Ibsen. It begins with a mother (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz) and…

THE SHACKLES OF RADIO ARE LOOSENED A BIT FOR THE STAGE Michael Gambon is tremendous in Trevor Nunn’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. The drama, first performed on BBC radio in 1957, follows septuagenarian Mrs. Rooney (Eileen Atkins) as she walks from her home to the train station to pick up…

SOUTHERN NOIR The narrative of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian orbits a murder in 1964 Jackson, Mississippi. Susan Perch (Amy Madigan) kicks her husband Bill (Ed Harris), a respected dentist, out of their house. He checks into the Jacksonian, a seedy motel which employs a creepy bartender, Fred (Bill Pullman), and a doltish avaricious waitress named…

OOFTA, INDEED The premise of C. Denby Swanson’s black comedy The Norwegians is that two Minnesotan women, Texas transplant Olive (Veronica Cruz) and Kentucky transplant Betty (Karla Hendrick) hire two very nice gangsters of Norwegian descent – Tor (Hamilton Clancy) and Gus (Dan Teachout) – to murder their ex-boyfriends. The bulk of the play is…

EAGER FOR MORE A farcical, semi-interactive burlesque fairytale – complete with girls in g-strings and tassels, a pun-spewing, corny joke-telling MC, a Jazz combo, and a working bar inside the house – Eager to Lose is a delight from beginning to end. And did I mention that most of the dialogue is in Shakespearian-esque verse?…

BACK TO THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS Definitely thoughtful, at times charming, occasionally compelling, but mostly tedious, Adriano Shaplin’s new play Sarah Flood in Salem Mass, tells of two girls from the future – Sara (Kate Thulin) and Juyoung (Jamie Bock) – who illegally use mom’s time machine and go back to 17th century Salem, Massachusetts,…

SOMETIMES LONGER WOULD BE BETTER Anxious to have a child with the best possible genes and distrustful of sperm from anonymous donors, Gretchen (Halley Feiffer) convinces her “gold-star” lesbian partner Laura (Susan Pourfar) to seduce and get surreptitiously impregnated by Chuck (Robert Beitzel), a lawyer at Gretchen’s firm, whose wonderful daughter, Gretchen argues, is proof…

A DRAGON IN BROOKLYN A true auteur and renaissance man of the theater, Robert Lepage returns with his troupe Ex Machina to The Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2013 Next Wave Festival, this time with his staging of The Blue Dragon, a not-to-be-missed show with a limited four-day run September 18-21. Mr. Lepage also…

STORY-LESS A rubber knife jiggles and bends during an ostensibly dramatic stabbing scene. Characters’ “trumpet playing” is out of sync with the actual trumpeter. Performers struggle to remember their lines. And the unremarkable dance numbers seem under-rehearsed and take place in a performance space that all too often feels overcrowded. These are some of the…

HELLO, GORGEOUS Jonathan Tolkin’s  keen and tremendously funny new show Buyer & Cellar, performed by Michael Urie, imagines what it would be like for Alex More, a young gay man struggling to make it as an actor in Hollywood, to find himself working in the artificial mall Barbara Streisand built in the basement of her “rustic”…

LOVE, SEX AND POETRY Thoroughly delightful and hilarious throughout, Dirty Great Love Story, which is part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, is just what its admittedly clunky title implies. Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, who together wrote, rhymed and perform the show under Pia Furtado’s direction, come out onto the stage,…

REASONS TO SEE THIS SHOW Neil LaBute’s explosive and wildly funny new comedy reasons to be happy, which Mr. LaBute also directs, starts off with a bang as Steph (Jenna Fischer), having stalked her ex-boyfriend Greg (Josh Hamilton) in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s, yells at him for starting up a romantic relationship with…

SOME PLAYS ARE “FORGOTTEN” FOR A REASON Part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Finborough Theatre’s classic staging of J.B. Priestley’s Cornelius, under Sam Yates’ expert direction, has rich performances and a textured period set by David Woodhead that makes one nostalgic for mechanical typewriters and landlines. Unfortunately, these elements are unable…

LOVE AS A MYTHICAL BEAST Compelling performances and Cat Parker’s surefooted direction overcome budgetary and other constraints associated with short-run, theater-festival productions, making Jenny Connell Davis’s Dragon, which is part of the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a worthwhile and at times quite moving theatrical experience. Often intentionally ambiguous, and combining the allegorical with the literary,…