Metal foil lines a bare stage, a black mirror warping the bodies of two barefoot couples in mourning. Two chairs, two milk crates rearrange themselves endlessly in patterns of resentment, avoidance, aggression, indifference during brief, unpredictable blackouts, as dissonant music plays and bits of glow tape flit through the dark like fireflies on a summer […]
Month: July 2019
The Threepenny Flute, or Kirill Drags Max to the Opera
When word reached Kirill that a production of his favorite opera “The Magic Flute” was touring from his native Berlin, he somehow convinced fellow Berliner Max to join him. What follows is a rough transcript of the bilingual debate that ensued, some of it edited for clarity, some translated from the German. Kirill: There’s something […]
Behind the Looking Glass: A Review of ‘A Strange Loop’
…but the musical numbers are so expansive, inventive, subversive, so side-splittingly funny that one quickly catches one’s breath. This is, after all, a musical, and as a musical, Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop triumphs. The audience leaps to its feet as Larry Owens’s Usher fittingly ends the endlessly self-referential play with its title, popping […]
Man as Machine: A Review of “In the Penal Colony”
The machine at the center of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony carves a man’s unnamed crime into his back until, in a moment of epiphany heralding death, he realizes what he has done. It’s a story heavy on exposition, the bulk of the text consisting of a detached, almost pedantic account of the workings of […]
Sweet Sorrow: A Playdate Review of Romeo and Juliet
Who would have thought proposing Romeo and Juliet as a Tinder date would get a girl ghosted? I mean I get it. To someone looking for a casual hookup what could be a bigger red flag? Here’s a guy who wants to vanish in the morrow and here’s a play where two people who just […]
An Ontological Argument: Max and Kirill Review “Crushing Baby Animals”
Who better to review a play about two headbutting artists than two headbutting critics? Max Raab and Kirill Antonin Zakharov talk cookies, sadomasochism, and the ontological argument in their joint review of Crushing Baby Animals, an immersive theatre piece running at The Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City, Queens through July 21. Max: The problem […]
A Modest Proposal, or Why I Did Not Attend the Hollywood Fringe Festival
The first thing that struck me on my virgin tour of Los Angeles last October was the homeless problem. On a cab ride from LAX to DTLA (that’s LA International Airport and Downtown Los Angeles for those of you unused to the Yanks’ fondness for acronyms), I counted no fewer than seventy-three tents, most of […]
Playdate Reviews The Last Croissant
You can tell a lot about a person by their sense of humor, or lack thereof. When “Doug” messaged me on Tinder and I mentioned I was only in town for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, he must have smelled easy prey. Little did he know he would find himself scowling through The Last Croissant, a […]