New York

WHEN BEING A STARVING WRITER IS NO LONGER ROMANTIC Austin Pendleton’s breathtaking performance and Ira Lewis’s penetrating script make Chinese Coffee, with all its flaws, a most worthwhile outing. In fact, at $18 a ticket, this show, directed by Louise Lasser, is all but mandatory viewing for lovers of personal, intimate theater, as well as…

THE UNKNOWABLE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN Is it possible for true love to be unrequited? Or, to put it another way, is it possible for unrequited love to be true? These  questions, on the surface as deceptively simple as Ivan Viripaev’s story-telling framework, are at the core of his play Illusions, which uses the queries…

THE GOOD, THE LOST, AND THE VAIN Owen Gould Davis, Sr.’s thoughtful and masterfully crafted 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound, which explores Puritan vanity and its many ironies, gets an admirable staging by Alex Roe and his all-around excellent cast at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Though not particularly startling or revolutionary, the show is good, solid…

A MERRY APPROACH TO A MELANCHOLY CLASSIC These days when directors revive a classic, they have to decide whether their approach will be either to modernize the play or mount it as a period piece, true to the spirit of the times in which it was created. Sometimes, as in the case of the The…

LOVE IS A MANY-SPLINTERED THING It’s after dark in Westchester County in 1976. Do you know where your parents are? Still under the spell of an ebullient consciousness raising meeting, two suburban Moms are sharing a joint and flirting.   Joyce Horowitz (Christine Verleny) explains the marijuana was a gift for her big 4-0; she’s a…

A CABARET SHOW THAT GOES FOR BAROQUE Mae West, the sage and sybarite from Brooklyn, used to say, “Let joy be unrefined,” a point of view that also suits Austin McCormick, artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV.   His latest extravaganza Rococo Rouge retools the roisterous risk-taking revelry he’s known for: bare skin, sultry ballet,…

DRAMA IN THE MARKETPLACE Trade Practices, which launches HERE’s 2014-2015 season, takes the audience on a tour into the bowels of the corporate world where deals are negotiated, promises are broken, and fortunes are made and lost. It was created by director Kristin Marting (HERE artistic director) and set designer David Evans Morris, who were…

ASPHYXIATING Neither the excellent quartet playing quality pieces that are at times rousing, nor Karl Ruckdeschel’s lovely period costumes, are enough to make Solitary Light, with music and lyrics by Randy Sharp and Paul Carbonara, a tolerable experience. With an artless libretto that is sentimental and always on-the-nose, the lack of a meaningful, or even…

A BIO-DRAMA THAT WORKS “Of course I care (what she thinks), I hate her,” says a character in Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, a San Francisco Playhouse production about the German artist Rudolf Bauer, who painted during the first half of the 20th century. It is one of many lines that pop in a play which, though…

SMOKIN’ The premise of Kim Davies’ new play Smoke, that two strangers, a young man and woman, who independently come to the kitchen to have a cigarette while a friendly S&M sex party is taking place in the rest of the apartment, and who wind up having a meaningful interaction, is like a minefield with…

MISS JULIE’S OFFSPRING In 2012 the Scandinavian American Theater Company commissioned four playwrights to each write a sort of riff on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The result is the four short plays that make up Bastards of Strindberg, a show so full of vitality and charisma that it often  overcomes its failings. Strindberg’s Miss Julie begins on…

A SWORD THAT’S HARD TO SWALLOW The best thing I can say about Kari Floren’s new play Voices of Swords is that it seems to be well-intentioned (it’s odd that the poster proclaims “new” when the play was produced and reviewed in 2008). Unfortunately, sitting through it feels like Ms. Floren and director Eve Brandstein…

A TASTY PUNCH NEEDS TO BE SPIKED Flowing dialogue, skillful performances, and Audrey Alford’s solid direction make Micheline Auger’s banal and predictable Donkey Punch, a play which attempts to explore the romantic relationships of two yupster couples in an ultra-contemporary setting, watchable and occasionally entertaining. Sexually carnivorous attorney Kareena (a wound up Cleo Gray) sets…

A DROP-DEAD DELIGHT Delightful in an over-the-top yet grounded and sympathetic portrayal of Idris Seabright, a well-off spinster obsessed with memories of her long-gone Latin lover, Everett Quinton is the jewel in Joe Brancato’s sharp and whimsical staging of Erasmus Fenn’s hilarious melodrama Drop Dead Perfect. The entire four-person cast is a joy to watch,…

THEATER AS A TEMPLE The Flea Theater commissioned 48 different playwrights to contribute short dramatic pieces to this tremendous production, which basically recounts all the narratives in the Bible from before the beginning of the universe to after its end.   The cycle’s list of authors contains newbies to some unexpectedly major names, from David Henry…

RAISING THE CLOWN BAR Did the TV series It give you nightmares for decades?   Does the art of John Wayne Gacy make you tremble?   Does dear old Bozo make you break out in hives?   If you suffer from coulrophobia – a fear of clowns – then Clown Bar, a site-specific production full of energy and…

STORMY ROMANCE It is sometimes the case that the plays that seem the simplest – three characters, a few dusty flats, a tiny, shoe-box set in a miniscule theater somewhere on the 12th floor of a building off of Times Square – is the work that has the most depth.   The Taste of It, John…

WHEN THE SAINTS COME DANCING IN Here’s a charming revue that sets to song and dance the words of the great poet Gertrude Stein, mistress of new language and one of the tremendous free spirits of the 20th century. If I were a critic of the heft and depth of, say, Stage and Cinema’s own…

PRO AND (EX-)CON In telling his true-life tale about being convicted of attempted murder and released following a hefty prison term, Joe Assadourian is proof that you can be a crook and still be a tremendously talented actor.   And, really, I don’t suppose anyone should be surprised at this idea.   Acting is merely the art…

RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE AS SURREAL BURLESQUE Delightful wouldn’t be a word I’d expect to use when describing a Robert Wilson show. But The Old Woman, adapted by Darryl Pinckney from an absurdist story by Daniil Kharms, and performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe, is just that. Whimsical, darkly funny, and disquieting throughout, Wilson’s striking spectacle…