New York

BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED In a way shows that are pure spectacle – acrobat, dance, magic – must achieve a higher level of virtuosity to be successful than, say, theatrical plays. Even a flawed play can be satisfying. An abundance of drama, for instance, can help take our attention away from the superficiality of the…

LOVE, FAMILY AND ALIENATION One of the questions at the center of Terrence McNally’s insightful and moving drama Mothers and Sons is, Why is it so difficult for a mother to love her son for who he is, and vice versa? McNally initially frames the problem in terms of a homophobic mother’s inability to accept…

A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In 1980, in a television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adversary and fellow writer, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, saying that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Unfortunately, Hellman was…

THE HUMAN WHISPERER Most theatrical performances feel a little awkward at the beginning; even in good shows it usually takes the actors a few minutes to settle into their characters and to find the correct modulation for their voices. Which is why Milton Zoth’s staging of Daniel Damiano’s hilarious drama Day of the Dog is…

AN UNHAPPY COUPLE – UNHAPPY IN ITS OWN WAY Stockholm Syndrome is a form of traumatic bonding in which hostages develop an irrational sympathy for their captors. The term refers to a robbery in Stockholm in which bank employees who were held hostage in a vault for six days not only rejected government assistance, but…

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THE THEATER As staged by Linda Ames Key, Paul Bowles’ adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play that imagines three individuals’ hell as being trapped in a room together for all eternity, succeeds less as a conventional show and more as performance art: Ms. Key really lets…

A FINE INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE It takes a few minutes to get going but once it does Ryan Lee’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale becomes dynamic entertainment; Mr. Lee and his fine group of actors succeed in making the experience of watching a 400-year-old play written in verse both intimate and immediate. King of…

SQUASHED HOPES MAKE FOR BRILLIANT THEATER What a relief it is, what a glorious pleasure for a viewer, after sitting through so much unnecessary theater, to find oneself finally in the hands of an artist and master. You let yourself fall into them knowing that they will catch you and hold you and carry you…

THE FRUSTRATED AND THE BORED Watching The Cake Shop Theater Company perform Martin Crimp’s brisk new translation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s sharp 1926 play Pains of Youth, about a group of medical students residing in a boarding house in 1923 Vienna, a thought occurred to me: If the same amount of effort as director Katie Lupica…

A STUMP Sitting through Erin Mallon’s 90-minute play Branched, A Comedy with Consequences, I found myself envying the gentleman who, silently and with the upmost discretion, managed to sneak out of the theater during one of the scene changes; 15 minutes in it is painfully clear that nothing worthwhile will happen on this stage. The…

LES MS. Conceived, written and choreographed by Ruthe Ponturo, Til Divorce Do Us Part is a collection of musical numbers, each illustrating different aspects of divorce from the point of view of Kate (Erin Maguire), an affluent, white, middle-aged former wife whose husband left her for his young Pilates instructor. Whether or not you enjoy…

MASTURBATING IN THE SUBURBS As directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw’s ironically titled new comedy Intimacy is not for the squeamish. A male character literally masturbates to internet porn, stroking a formidable erection which the actor has trouble stuffing back into his boxer-briefs when the scene ends’”talk about a game performer. This is just a…

A DANCE OF LIGHT IN DARKNESS A delight for both kids and adults, the clever and inventive entertainment iLuminate brings to mind the image of dancing graffiti. Wearing black body suits equipped with different colored neon lights, the performers move in darkness; all one sees are illuminations. Populated by fantastic creatures that dance, fly, fall…

BROTHERS’ BOND Josh Hecht does an outstanding job directing Jake Jeppson’s effective new play The Clearing, about two brothers who suffer from a dark secret they’ve shared for the past 17 years. Chris Ellis is an emotional man-child in his late twenties; he is burly, excitable, prone to acting out, and unable to deal with…

LEAR, BECAUSE IT’S THERE A friend commented to me once that as hard to take as Orthodox Jews might seem to us secular ones, it is largely thanks to them and their stubborn adherence to the old ways that the Jewish religion is still around today. Something similar can be said of the practitioners of…

A WIND OF DISAPPOINTMENT Having seen some months ago Paul Takacs’s outstanding staging of a two-character play called Tender Napalm, I was very much looking forward to watching his imagining of Jon Fosse’s enigmatic two-character play I Am the Wind (adapted into English by Simon Stephens). Unfortunately, as tight and inspired as his direction of…

DIARY OF A PRETENTIOUS NITWIT The Woman in the one-woman show The Surrender, adapted for the stage by Isabelle Stoffel and Toni Bentley from Ms. Bentley’s book The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, tells of how she finds God while receiving her first anal sex, and continues to find Him 297 more times until her dalliance…

THEATRICALIZING AN ARTIST’S WORLD The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography or perhaps an imagined eulogy of performance artist Marina Abramović, the show’s still living collaborator, is fairly straightforward in its narrative, at least in the sense of being chronological. The ways in which it differs from the more conventional biographies and stage…

A LOVELY INNOVATIVE STAGING OF AN OLD FAVORITE Theater artistry overcomes budgetary constraints in Jessica Burr’s delightful and poignant staging of A Christmas Carol, from Matt Opatrny’s admirable adaptation of Dickens’ novella. Six actors play over seventeen characters in this classic tale of redemption, in which Ebenezer Scrooge, a lonely old miser, is shown the…

A BEAUTIFUL SHELL WITHOUT A NUT A show can be forgiven many things when its characters are compelling and its dramatics are solid; if the audience is emotionally involved in the fate of the personages, they won’t notice or won’t so much care about the little problems, the little mistakes. Conversely, if we have nothing…