New York

A REY OF SUNSHINE ENDS UP CLOUDY Director Chay Yew mounts a spectacular production of Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, a reworking of Sophocles’ tragedy set in the Barrio of present-day Los Angeles. Energetic performances, excellent use of a spare but effective set, dramatic lighting and music all make a powerful impression. This in spite…

FULL MEASURE More often than not, stagings of Shakespeare plays turn into dull, tedious exercises. The reasons for this vary but the one problem that always seems present is the lack of an artistically significant personal and urgent connection between material and interpreter. To put it another way, one often gets the sense of productions…

UNDER INSPECTION Michael Urie pops and sparkles as Ivan Alexandreyevich Hlestakov, a foppish but penniless out-of-work clerk who gets mistaken for the Czar’s inspector by the corrupt officials of a Russian backwater in Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor. Reimagined by Mr. Hatcher as an out-and-out farce and directed as such by Jesse Berger,…

ROOM TO GROW In a way Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is a perfect play. It’s like a well-ordered house, comfortable, professionally decorated, where everything works. The story is straightforward, told simply, about real people with real problems. We empathize with the characters and sympathize with their plight. Anne Kauffman’s tempered direction for Roundabout Theatre Company…

STET OFFENSIVE After watching Kim Davies’ inspired S&M play  Smoke, about two young people connecting in the kitchen of a house in which a sex party is in progress, I became an instant fan. Full of lovely subtleties and ambiguities, Smoke is something to see, and if you get a chance to catch a production I…

RADIANT THEATER In Philip Ridley’s brilliant black satire Radiant Vermin, a seemingly nice, average twenty-something couple with an infant, tells us of the horrible things they did to get their dream home, confident that once we’ve heard the whole story we’ll “understand,” as everything they did, they did “for baby.” Jill (Scarlett Alice Johnson) and…

A BRILLIANT TRIFLE Watching members of the Stephen Joseph Theatre perform Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions under the playwright’s helmsmanship, I found myself mentally comparing the troupe to a team of Navy SEALs executing a mission with impeccable timing and precision. Performances are deft and subtle, with all five players demonstrating impressive range as each portrays a…

MINDING THE BODY When the lights come up on Body: Anatomies of Being, the nine cast members walk out and stand at the foot of the stage facing the audience, all of them naked save one, who is dressed in a business suit. They do nothing. The house lights come up, and cast and audience…

WILLIAMS ASCENDING Irene Glezos delivers a lovely, stirring performance as Lady in Austin Pendleton’s staging of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece Orpheus Descending. A force of nature, Lady says and does things almost in spite of herself. A prisoner of her childlike sincerity, she is at once witty, ironic, funny, melodramatic, all almost without intending to be,…

THE EFFECT OF GREAT THEATER In Lucy Prebble’s captivating two-act, The Effect, crisply directed by David Cromer, 20-somethings Connie (Susannah Flood) and Tristan (Carter Hudson) meet as test subjects in a clinical study of a new anti-depressant. On the surface it seems they would make an unlikely couple ’” he’s an unemployed free spirit with…

ALL TOO HUMAN Stephen Karam’s remarkable new play The Humans begins with Erik Blake (the excellent Reed Birney) standing on the upper level of a shabby, half-dark basement/ground-floor tenement duplex, holding two bags of groceries, his expression suggesting a man weighed down by existential anxiety. The stillness is broken by the sound of something massive…

LET’S GET PHYSICS ALL For parents who recall Professor Julius Sumner Miller’s television programs with nostalgia, who wish the Science Channel had more science shows, and for whom quality time with their kids includes watching YouTube videos in which the laws of physics are demonstrated using everyday objects, Dave Maiullo’s That Physics Show, produced and…

PHONY  PONY TALE There exists a type of small theater production in which a lack of resources’”material ones and, sometimes, those less tangible’”is made up for by the show’s intimacy and inclusivity, and by the performers’ enthusiasm and youth (they are always young). These endeavors are usually self-conscious, often interactive, and have an unfinished, homemade feel’”as…

BURIED BETWEEN THE LINES In Scott Elliott’s surefooted staging of Sam Shepard’s imperfect Buried Child, watching Ed Harris sitting on a raggedy couch under an old blanket in front of a little TV while audience members shuffle into the house and settle in their seats is worth the price of admission. Mr. Harris melts into…