New York

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…

COSPLAYING WITH THE BARD A delightful dash through Shakespearean tropes is now the two hours’ traffic of The Connelly Theater stage. Siblings separated in a tempest, long lost lovers, conjoined twins, a criminal mime, and even a conniving witch are all stirred into Kevin Brewer’s fantastical new play Island, or To Be or Not to…

SHOUTING FOR THE MAJORITY In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rise of the 99%, Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 political drama An Enemy of the People crackles with contemporary relevance. Manhattan Theatre Club’s production is painted in bold and brash strokes, but it certainly strikes while the iron is hot – just before the…

CHILLING BUT  MADDENING We are bunkered down in a ratty East Village apartment: blood stains smeared across the walls and newspapers plastered over the windows so the sunlight seeps in with a sickly glow. Loose electric wires poke down from the punctured ceiling, and a woman lies face down, sprawled on the living room floor beside…

HOW LOVE DIES: TWO VERSIONS Brian Friel’s excellent 1968 play Lovers is actually two separate plays with similar themes and settings. Both take place in a small town in Ireland in the mid 1960’s and both deal with how the hard, petty realities of life trample love’”and the excitement, sentiment and hope that come with…

HAUNTING HOWLS Rose Afratian harbors a dark secret. This wiry old woman’s shoulders are hunched and her eyes are sunken from ninety-one years of hell on earth, living with a sin she dare not share. Still, this staunch Armenian woman endures. In Alexander Dinelaris’ Red Dog Howls, several chilling scenes and gripping performances make up…

NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’s dilapidated house, which is one of three Williams one-acts in Something Wild…, presented by Pook’s Hill, with Ken Schatz directing. Ms. Frazer’s piercing portrayal, so tender…