Harvey Perr

FORGET YOUR TROUBLES.   COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening line; and it is so hilarious one can’t help but wonder if he can ever top it.   But what follows assures us that…

MAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots.   For those of us who have longed for the early days of his short but tantalizing pieces – with their seemingly non-professional actors, whose affectless recitations, never driven by emotions,…

WHERE IS DR. STRANGELOVE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? The best thing about Joe Kern’s Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them is its title.   And if it bears a close resemblance to the title of a famous Stanley Kubrick satire, it is purely intentional.   Indeed, before…

SOLD: ONE HOUSE.   AT A DISAPPOINTING RATE. Since Daniel Fish has been certified a new genius by New York’s avant-garde elite, I am loath to label him a hoax on the basis of having seen just one of his productions, but House for Sale, the Jonathan Franzen essay which Fish has adapted and directed for…

SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING Andrea Marcovicci, who reinvented the torch song for a new generation, has looked our depression/recession straight in the face and decided that what she needs to do is to lift our spirits.   In Smile, her current show at the Café Carlyle, Marcovicci’s toothy smile radiates the purest form of…

THE JOURNEY HOMEWARD The title character in Simon Stephens’s freshly observed new play, Harper Regan, is at a crossroads in her life, in the midst of what we used to call a midlife crisis.   Her father is dying.   Her boss (a slyly direct Jordan Lage) won’t give her the time off to see him.   Her…

TIRED SATIRE “Satire,” as George S. Kaufman once famously said, “is what closes Saturday night.”   Though written in jest, it has served as an admonition for playwrights in pursuit of satire. In this age of political unrest, where sharp satire of our cultural differences is not only necessary but essential (and hardly forthcoming), we crave…

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have expected from the author of Proof: clean, articulate, measured, intelligent, carefully researched, and, finally, Saharan-dry and as dull as a persistently cloudy…