New York

WHERE IS DR. STRANGELOVE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? The best thing about Joe Kern’s Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them is its title.   And if it bears a close resemblance to the title of a famous Stanley Kubrick satire, it is purely intentional.   Indeed, before…

SOLD: ONE HOUSE.   AT A DISAPPOINTING RATE. Since Daniel Fish has been certified a new genius by New York’s avant-garde elite, I am loath to label him a hoax on the basis of having seen just one of his productions, but House for Sale, the Jonathan Franzen essay which Fish has adapted and directed for…

A BLOODY GOOD TIME Bloody Sunday is a 1972 incident in Derry, Northern Ireland, during which 13 civil rights protestors and bystanders were shot and killed by the British Army. Although the tragic events have been artistically immortalized in song, poetry, fine art, and even before in the theater, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of…

SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING Andrea Marcovicci, who reinvented the torch song for a new generation, has looked our depression/recession straight in the face and decided that what she needs to do is to lift our spirits.   In Smile, her current show at the Café Carlyle, Marcovicci’s toothy smile radiates the purest form of…

WELL INTENTIONED, ILL-CONCEIVED Whispers of “pretentious” could be heard in the audience of Paul David Young’s new play In the Summer Pavilion, which doesn’t seem like a fair assessment. Calling a work pretentious suggests a certain lack of sincerity on the part of its creator, as if he’s more concerned with showing off his abilities…

A POETIC BREAKUP The plot of writer/director Pascal Rambert’s play Love’s End is astoundingly simple. A long-term romantic relationship finally reaches a breaking point. The man confronts the woman in an extended soliloquy, after which the woman turns the tables and has her say. This familiar drama nonetheless plays out with incredible intensity. Love’s End…

THE JOURNEY HOMEWARD The title character in Simon Stephens’s freshly observed new play, Harper Regan, is at a crossroads in her life, in the midst of what we used to call a midlife crisis.   Her father is dying.   Her boss (a slyly direct Jordan Lage) won’t give her the time off to see him.   Her…

THE JOADS AT HOME Playwright Randy Sharp’s one act drama takes place during the Dust Bowl catastrophe of the 1930s, when a monstrous drought descended on the central plain states turning fertile fields and prairies into alkali hellpits.   Of course, most of us are familiar with Steinbeck’s great novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which followed…

DRINKS WITH A RAKE Find the nearest bottle of vodka and drink up. Ars Nova’s world premiere of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 – an electro-pop musicalization of a self-contained section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace – offers up a tantalizing environmental experience. Dramaturgically, however, this new musical wouldn’t hold up in…

EXTRAORDINARILY BEAUTIFUL  PIGPEN PROJECT PigPen Theatre Co.’s The Old Man and the Old Moon is guaranteed to gently pluck at your heartstrings. An enchanting fable told through shadow puppetry, movement, music, and theatrical lighting, this ensemble play seems aesthetically filtered through Instagram. A warm glow emanates from the stage of the Gym at Judson, where a…

TIRED SATIRE “Satire,” as George S. Kaufman once famously said, “is what closes Saturday night.”   Though written in jest, it has served as an admonition for playwrights in pursuit of satire. In this age of political unrest, where sharp satire of our cultural differences is not only necessary but essential (and hardly forthcoming), we crave…

PINCHES GRINGOS! The aliens have arrived. Mexicans, that is. Fucking Mexicans. And fucking Nigerians. Small town Southern girl Tamara-Lee can’t seem to decide which she hates more. I Hate Fucking Mexicans is a zany satire of cultural stereotypes, and no one is exempt from the raucous critique – particularly the fucking Americans like Tamara-Lee and…

PUT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION Anticipating having to review Owen Dunne’s new play Positions, the feeling I had while watching it  – knowing the production to have travelled 600 miles to New York City and seeing it performed on a Saturday night to a near-empty house  – was similar to that of watching a roach trying to…

THE FAMILY THAT STAYS TOGETHER HATES TOGETHER The legacy of emotional damage inflicted on children by their parents is one of the main themes in Him, a new play by Daisy Foote – but the subtext is given an even more delicious dimension by the fact that Foote herself is the daughter of the magnificent…

SOPHISTICATED SONGWRITING IN CLOSER THAN EVER One might well approach this musical about growing into middle age with some trepidation.   The fact is that plays about midlife usually tend to possess more than a whiff of self indulgence – they’re either full of characters who spend their time whining about the fact that they aren’t…

NORTH GOES SOUTH As a child, I flew to the stars with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince – a work of youthful wonder tinged with adult melancholy, loneliness, and wistful philosophical musings. In 1939, Anne Morrow Lindbergh – a novelist in her own right, as well as wife of pilot Charles Lindbergh – found…

AN AMUSING TRIFLE A.R. Gurney’s entertaining, dynamic but trivial new play Heresy reinvents the story of Jesus Christ (in the play he’s called Chris), changing the setting from 33 A.D. Jerusalem to America in the not-so-distant future. Jim Simpson’s solid direction, engaging performances, clever dialogue, well-articulated ideas and an abundance of jokes manage to distract…

REAL TERROR IN THE AIR AND IN THE THEATER If this play doesn’t make you want to travel by train instead of by air, nothing will.   Here’s a performance project (credited to creators Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving Gregory) that consists of a cast of actors performing the transcripts of recordings retrieved from the…