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 […]
Author: Joshua Crone
Took up playwriting as a Marine in Southern California and spent the next decade supporting his habit with jobs as a carpenter, programmer, fisherman, teacher, before settling on a career in Polish and German translation. Along the way, wrote and directed plays in Krakow, Berlin and London, earned a Masters in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University and studied directing at the Polish National Film School in Lodz. In 2014, moved to Los Angeles, where he crewed on half a dozen films at AFI, produced several plays and shot his first feature. Currently lives in Astoria, Queens. Recent New York productions include Squatters, Washed in the Blood and The Jail at Philippi.
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
“Of the Woman…”: A Review
Lily Houghton’s new play “Of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her we all die” starts strong with a promising premise and a talented cast. Unfortunately, it takes a problematic turn halfway through and drives on for far too long. As a thesis, this sounds harsh and categorical, which is why I chose to get […]
“Terra Firma”: A Platform at the End of the World
Micronations hold a perennial fascination for students of the human condition. On the one hand, they seem to offer a ready model of the commonwealth on an individual scale, a Leviathan shrunk down to human dimensions. On the other, they represent the possibility of radical self-determination. And what could be more attractive in a world […]
Looking Through a Glass Onion: A Review of “This Is Why We Live”
A Nobel laureate, a cellist, two actors, three languages—it sounds like a list from one of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lyrical flights of irony. On the surface the recipe promises a reverential homage to a Great Writer, the kind of soufflé savored by schoolteachers and cultural attachés and roundly parodied by exiled Polish writer Witold […]
A Coney Island of the Mind: Strindberg’s “The Father”
There’s a passage in August Strindberg’s autobiographical novel Inferno where the playwright, with a madman’s talent for connecting random dots, builds a vast conspiracy out of a pianist playing Schumann’s Aufschwung in the next room. In The Father, running at Theater for the New City through September 2, that same talent is on brilliant display—this […]
“At Black Lake” Speaks, But What Is It Saying?
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 […]
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 […]