In the end, abandoned by the audience, two actors trapped in an unheated theater perform for an empty house to ward off the cold. Blanks swapped for bullets elevate murder-suicide from melodramatic plot device to ritual sacrifice. And when the shooting-within-a-shooting fails on both levels, the actor/characters are left with themselves, each other, an empty […]
Noh Joke: A Review of “One Green Bottle”
The first minute of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre’s One Green Bottle, running at La MaMa through 8 March, is already well worth the ticket price. Where else in the States can one see Japanese noh performed (albeit briefly), complete with kimono, fan, wooden bridge, and black-robed musician? Kneeling with zen-like calm amid an embarrassment of musical […]
Pinter à l’américaine: A review of “The Dumb Waiter”
Precision is a quality we expect of detectives and surgeons, not playwrights. Yet it’s precisely what makes Pinter’s plays so unnerving. The pregnant pauses like labor pains at the birth of some monstrous crime. The forensic insistence on minute detail, right down to the crumbs of an Eccles cake. As if each crumb were evidence […]
DeSotelle and the Deep Blue Sea
“We’re all more than the worst thing we’ve done.” That’s not a line from “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.” It’s a quote from public interest lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson. But it could serve as a tagline for John DeSotelle’s deeply affecting production of John Patrick Shanley’s modern classic, running at the […]
Max and Kirill Go to “The Thin Place”
A séance in the intimate (by off-Broadway standards) Peter Jay Sharp Theater? Max agreed to suspend his disbelief long enough to join Kirill for “The Thin Place,” a haunting new play by Lucas Hnath running through January 5th at Playwrights Horizons. From there they retired to Astoria watering hole and RfU stomping ground The Local […]
La MaMa’s “Trojan Women”
We watched astonished as the Greeks burst in, pikes leveled, horns blaring, a song of victory on their lips. We said nothing as they mocked us in strange tongues and herded us into the great hall to witness scenes of horror. To see mothers and daughters carted away in separate cages. A princess dragged off […]
An Ear to the Celestial Vault in “The Listening Room”
One of the pleasures of attending fringe theatre is discovering unexpected troves of art tucked away in underground spaces. A prime example is The New Ohio Theatre, which, to judge by the imposing vault door, once concealed wealth of a more mundane character.
Cricket Does “Cocaine”: A Playdate Review
Well, technically this isn’t a playdate review, and no, I don’t literally do cocaine. I was fed up with online dating, so I went alone to the opening night of “Cocaine,” a two-hander by Pendleton King at the John DeSotelle Studio in Hell’s Kitchen. And in the crowded lobby of the Nubox I met a […]
Appetite for Deconstruction or A Culinary Guide to ‘Pataphysics: Max and Kirill Review “Now Serving” and “The Infinite Wrench”
Two plays with culinary themes and a pataphysical bent. Two reviewers with appetites for deconstruction and a taste for Alfred Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions. In the theatrical equivalent of a pub crawl, Max and Kirill bicycled from Radiohole’s Now Serving: A Guide to Aesthetic Etiquette in Four Courses at The Collapsible Hole to the […]
“Heroes of the Fourth Turning”: Five Characters in Search of a God
Your eyes adjust to the dark, your ears to the silence. A figure on a back porch reaches for a rifle. Gunshot. Your ears ring. The man ambles offstage and reenters shouldering a deer. The carcass flops on the deck, the knife goes in. Blackout. So begins “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a gripping new […]