New York

NEITHER NORA Nora, Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, centers on its titular character, a beautiful young wife and mother, whose cozy life at her husband’s bosom is threatened when she is blackmailed over an indiscretion she committed years earlier to save his life. The play, performed in New York City for…

LOVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA Daphne Rubin-Vega delivers a riveting performance in Empanada Loca, a sinewy one-woman show written and directed by Aaron Mark. Inspired by the legend of Sweeney Todd, this dark, often comic tale of murder and cannibalism, set in gentrified Washington Heights, is told to us by its protagonist, Dolores, and begins below…

A  CERTAIN FUTURITY César  Alvarez’s fascinating musical Futurity begins with Mr. Alvarez and Sammy Tunis taking the stage as themselves, greeting the audience, engaging in improvised banter, then performing a song about Sylvester Magee. A real person who claimed to have been born a slave in 1841 and to have fought in the Union army, Magee lived…

ANTIGONE AND JULIETTE In Anne Carson’s crisp new translation of Sophkles’ Antigone, the great Juliette Binoche embodies the title character, a young woman who breaks the law under penalty of death to do what she knows to be morally right. Staged in the present, the answer to why director Ivo van Hove’s revival is relevant…

HAM IN  BED At the beginning of Hamlet in Bed, when its author and co-star Michael Laurence comes up to the standup microphone at the front of the stage, I can’t help wanting him to succeed; his manner’”shy and awkward, earnest, sincere’”make him a sympathetic, if only moderately engaging, presence. And even though in playing Michael’”a…

ON GOLDEN PONDLING In her perfect little one-woman show Pondling, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman is captivating as Madeleine, a little girl who lives with her older brother on her grandfather’s farm. Too young to be a useful farmhand, Madeleine is largely left to her own devices, and spends her time crushing empty cans; riding to the pond…

LOOP  DREAMS I’m not partial to dramas set in prisons; these tend to be ugly, depressing, violent and hopeless, or worse’”sentimental, and I find myself reluctant to be transported to such worlds. Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott’s Whorl Inside a Loop, set in a maximum security correctional facility, is not one of these. Heartfelt and…

ALTRUISM OR ARTISTRY? Margaret’s Safe Place, “a boarding facility that houses the most vulnerable students of The Kibera School for Girls” in Kenya, sheltering girls from domestic sexual violence, will receive 35% of all proceeds’”ticket and beverage sales’”generated by Brooke M. Haney’s Kiss Me or Cut Off My Head. This isn’t a drop in the…

MÉNAGE í€ TWADDLE At the conclusion of Yussef El Guindi’s new play Threesome it isn’t unreasonable to ask oneself the following question: What does the semi-comic attempt of three young arty types to engage in group sex in an unnamed American metropolis have to do with the politically motivated, state sanctioned gang-rape of a female…

TOOTHLESS  RUTHLESS Though useful as a showcase for the capable performers and boasting some excellent singing, Joel Paley’s revival of his gray farce Ruthless!, a self-referential spoof of Broadway musicals, offers few laughs, little suspense and no surprises; at least one audience member found himself stifling yawns as he fought the urge to nod off. Played…

SHADOW (OF A) PLAY Visually striking and radiating love and sincerity, Manual Cinema’s shadow-puppet show Ada/Ava, which attempts to explore septuagenarian Ada’s inner turmoil   after the death of her twin sister Ava, leaves one emotionally unsatisfied; for all of the production’s lovely elements the story is dull, the show boring. Ada (Julia Miller) and Ava…

THEIR PERFECT MINDS Written by director Kathryn Hunter and performers Paul Hunter and Edward Petherbridge, My Perfect Mind begins with Dr. Witznagel (Mr. Hunter) coming out onto Michel Vale’s slanted-floor set in white lab coat, an absurd curly wig, and speaking with a cartoony German accent, and telling us about “EPS:Edward Petherbridge Syndrome.” He informs…

GREAT DEPICTION OF WAR, BUT WHAT FOR? Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, written and directed by Daniel Talbott, begins in near darkness with a Serbian Woman (Jelena Stupljanin) in a desert delivering a monologue in Serbian that we can guess has to do with her having been gang-raped and tortured; later we learn this was at…

HOW SWEET THIS SOUND The standout theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), much acclaimed for their six-hour-plus show Gatz, among others, brings the first part of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury to the Public Theater, performing it in its entirety, with spectacular results. The section of the novel in question consists wholly…

EVERYTHING OLD COUNTRY FEELS NEW AGAIN In Mark Roberts’ delightful and moving play New Country, skillfully directed by David Harwell, 25-year-old country music star Justin is up to his usual antics on the eve of his wedding’”partying, philandering, and treating everyone around him like crap. Good-looking, charismatic and egotistical, Justin (David Lind) has never encountered…

THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING In Lucia Cox’s play One Hand Clapping, which she adapts from the 1961 Anthony Burgess novel and brings as director to 59E59 Theaters as part of their Brits Off Broadway Festival, Howard, a fastidious 30-ish used-car salesman with perfect photographic memory, uses his mental gift to win  £1000 on…

ALBANIAN/AMERICAN STORYTELLING As my Albanian friend put it: “The legend of Doruntine is the very core around which the Albanians’ national code of morals is organized (say those who believe in such bullshit).” Alternately known as “Constantine and Dorantine” and “Constantine’s Besa,” the legend goes something like this: Doruntine is an Albanian maiden whom a…

FIRST CLASS Directed by Cosmin Chivu, the staged reading of Tadeusz SŠ‚obodzianek’s play Our Class at the Skirball Center is everything one would expect from such an enterprise when put together with intelligence and good taste, and utilizing outstanding talent’”Ellen Burstyn, Kathleen Turner, Austin Pendleton, John Pankow, Mamie Gummer, Brian Murray, Alvin Epstein, Boyd Gains,…

PUTA TO THE TEST Inspired by the Ancient Greek drama surrounding Hippolytus, and set in a present-day South Bronx bodega, Desi Moreno-Penson’s new play Comida De Puta attempts to combine Nuyorican history and mythology, Espiritismo, and modernity into a mystical tapestry of magical realism that she calls Nuyorican Gothic: “stylized, dark, fantastical plays that take…

OK KILLS In Tom Diriwachter’s Great Kills, Tim, an overeducated 40-year-old loser who still lives in his father’s house on State Island, invites his successful childhood friend Robert over to try and convince him to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. The stage comes alive whenever the always excellent Joe Pantoliano, who plays Tim’s hard-drinking father,…