New York

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…

YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED AND NAKED Directed by Russell Dobular and written by him and the Naked Holiday Ensemble, with additional material by Stacy Lane, Endtimes Productions’ annual Christmastime spectacle Naked Holidays, now in its 7th incarnation, subverts the holy days theme with a delightful burlesque variety show full of dancing, singing, comedy, music, and lots…

THE GOOD WASPS There’s nothing especially remarkable about A.R. Gurney’s latest offering Family Furniture, a play that investigates a family of 1950s WASPs spending the summer at their Lake Erie vacation home. There are no terrible conflicts or unsolvable problems, no new ideas or exciting subtext, it isn’t suspenseful or particularly dramatic, and its relevance…

WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN MURDER? As a critic I’m embarrassed to gush but I must confess I gave my first standing ovation last night to honor Jefferson Mays who plays all eight unfortunate members of the D’Ysquith family in Steven Lutvak and Robert L. Freedman’s musical comedy A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Mr. Mays…

NOTHING IF NOT INTENSE The night their shelter burns down, two homeless Iraqi war veterans, Horace and Alicia, both suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are given vouchers to stay the night in a seedy motel, where they are menaced by past horrors and villains from the present. Such is the premise of Charles Fuller’s…

TWO PLAYS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE Many plays begin comically and end in tragedy. Rarely though does the trajectory go in the other direction, as it does with Fredrik Brattberg’s fascinating, multi-layered work The Returning, one half of a double bill, Norway Plays: Drama Beyond Ibsen. It begins with a mother (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz) and…

THE SHACKLES OF RADIO ARE LOOSENED A BIT FOR THE STAGE Michael Gambon is tremendous in Trevor Nunn’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. The drama, first performed on BBC radio in 1957, follows septuagenarian Mrs. Rooney (Eileen Atkins) as she walks from her home to the train station to pick up…

SOUTHERN NOIR The narrative of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian orbits a murder in 1964 Jackson, Mississippi. Susan Perch (Amy Madigan) kicks her husband Bill (Ed Harris), a respected dentist, out of their house. He checks into the Jacksonian, a seedy motel which employs a creepy bartender, Fred (Bill Pullman), and a doltish avaricious waitress named…

MUCH BETTER THAN GOOD The last thing that Brecht would have wanted is the audience to identify with his characters. But that’s where the Foundry Theatre’s production of Good Person of Szechwan so brilliantly succeeds. Rather than distancing the audience with didactic Marxism and dubious Orientalia, the play dives headlong into the despair of a…

OOFTA, INDEED The premise of C. Denby Swanson’s black comedy The Norwegians is that two Minnesotan women, Texas transplant Olive (Veronica Cruz) and Kentucky transplant Betty (Karla Hendrick) hire two very nice gangsters of Norwegian descent – Tor (Hamilton Clancy) and Gus (Dan Teachout) – to murder their ex-boyfriends. The bulk of the play is…

DEPRESSING DEPRESSION ERA DRAMA What a time!   Folks standing on line for charity handouts, companies closing down, destitution and despair all around.   Surprise, though, we’re not talking about nowadays – we’re talking about the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of playwright Danielle M. Velkoff’s well-intentioned but clumsy period drama.   It’s an interesting idea…

MOZART’S SISTER: POSSIBLY MORE TALENTED, DEFINITELY BETTER LEGS In many one person shows that are biographies of historical personages, there’s the risk of Wikipedia syndrome, in which the performer essentially just narrates the events of her character’s life, as though they’ve just been dictated straight from some website chronology. Fortunately, writer-performer Sylvia Milo’s luscious depiction…

EAGER FOR MORE A farcical, semi-interactive burlesque fairytale – complete with girls in g-strings and tassels, a pun-spewing, corny joke-telling MC, a Jazz combo, and a working bar inside the house – Eager to Lose is a delight from beginning to end. And did I mention that most of the dialogue is in Shakespearian-esque verse?…

VERDICT: WEAK ADAPTATION There’s something innately suspenseful about a courtroom drama.   Perhaps it’s the fact that real life courtrooms are themselves theaters and a criminal trial is essentially one long play – either a tragedy or a melodrama, depending on the result.   The prosecutor puffs, the defense attorney huffs, and the defendant squirms and tries…