New York

AFLOAT ON HIGH ASPIRATIONS Many positive things can and should be said about Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home, a play about a three-day cruise at the end of which the passengers participate in a secret, transformative ritual. The play is an allegory, an indictment of thoughtless first-world consumerism, as well as materialism, superficiality, and…

FORGET YOUR TROUBLES.   COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening line; and it is so hilarious one can’t help but wonder if he can ever top it.   But what follows assures us that…

MAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots.   For those of us who have longed for the early days of his short but tantalizing pieces – with their seemingly non-professional actors, whose affectless recitations, never driven by emotions,…

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new show Ich, Kí¼rbisgeist are, ironically, also its charms. Or is it vice versa? The invented language the characters speak – English with Scandinavian…

HOUSE  NOT AT  HOME IN THE THEATER My theatergoing companion left the Duke on 42nd Street last night with tears welling in her eyes. She spent much of the subway ride home taking deep breaths to recover from Transport Group’s House for Sale, adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s personal essay about selling his childhood house after his mother’s…

A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production of Jon Fosse’s outstanding play A Summer Day, which had the misfortune of being admired and subsequently translated and helmed…

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…