Lawrence Bommer

TRAPPED IN A DREARY DRAMEDY There’s a tender scene at the start of HOMOS, OR EVERYONE IN AMERICA (a perversely paradoxical title) that wants to convince us that Jordan Seavey’s lads really are  lovers. Brooklyn’s streetlights are dark from a power failure, so one guy comforts the other by playing some vinyl Vivaldi and holding him…

NO CLOSURE FOR GENOCIDE Family is how history happens. As Arthur Miller wisely showed in  All My Sons,  The Gift  and  The Crucible, change radiates outward. Even, or especially, an immense abomination like the Holocaust can’t be measured in six million dead as powerfully as in one family crushed and confronted by what was, what might have been, and…

A WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It’s not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness,  Nightmares and Nightcaps: The Stories of John Collier  pays hilarious homage to a British-born master of the macabre. Collier (1901-1980), a long-time  New Yorker  contributor…

CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES MYTHS SOMETHING Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Cassandra transported to a New Jersey suburb in 1960. There the same cycle of repression and revenge repeats itself. The ancient victims — two anti-heroines with loathsome mates, one religious martyr, and a disrespected prophetess — are now, respectively, two pill-popping, grievance-nursing…

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home.  Rick Stone the Blues Man  departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaBelle or Dionne Warwick. Bringing things down to basics, B.E.T.’s new revue salutes their own singers in founder-playwright Jackie Taylor’s most personal musical labor of love. A…

RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But this closeted playwright made one emotion his particular domain — loneliness. In  Picnic,  Come Back, Little Sheba,  and  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs  (to close the Eclipse…

SIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like  Everyman  anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th  century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deeds.  Everybody, with its nonspecific title an improvement on the original, modernizes a hugely popular medieval masterwork. The anonymously written  Everyman  was an allegorical depiction of the titular Christian’s…

BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation and renewal: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit  Million Dollar Quartet  reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a Memphis studio that brought together Sun Records’ once and future icons: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash — and Elvis Presley. We see rock ‘n’ roll history…

IT’S LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE BARD’S FIRST LOOK AT LOVE Happily, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare’s first play, is not like the first pancake — a test case to be thrown away. A trifle depicting the too-forgivable treachery of fickle Proteus to everyone around him — especially his faithful Julia — it employs…

OPEN SESAME SEASON Peter Pan never grew up. Likewise Alice in Wonderland, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, Nancy Drew, Huck Finn, or Donald Trump. It’s a pity people do: Why must grown-ups leave behind innocence and imagination after we mistakenly blunder into adulthood? You  can  take it with you — when it’s  Avenue Q. This 2003 musical…

A DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE VIEW Now a nearly forgotten but seminal gay tragedy, it happened after Stonewall but before AIDS and Orlando’s Pulse terrorist attack – a 1973 arson atrocity in The Big Easy. Powerfully premiered by Circle Theatre at the Pride Arts Center, The View UpStairs is Max Vernon’s 2013 musical, nominated for…