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 […]
Category: Drama
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
Theatrical Investigations: A Review of ‘Ludwig and Bertie’
‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ A famously pregnant quote that, like much of Wittgenstein, defies easy interpretation, idiomatic translation. Though perhaps it could best be rendered as a variation on the old parental saw: ‘If you can’t say anything meaningful, don’t say anything at all.’ I mention it not only because […]
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 […]
An Englishman, an Irishman and an American Wake Up in Plato’s Cave
Whatever political realities may have prompted Animus Theatre Company’s captivating revival of Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch over Me, the universally human dimensions of the play are what ultimately justify its extended sentence. The unrelenting image of two, sometimes three, men chained to a wall burns itself into the brain in the course […]
Healing the Divide: A Review of “Skylar”
Dedicated specialists have struggled since the time of Brecht to keep the theatre alive. The diagnosis is clear: Film and television have set in. But approaches to treatment differ. The Broadway and off-Broadway approach, essentially palliative, staves off death with injections of cash for movie stars and elaborate spectacles. Then there is off-off-Broadway, a loose-knit […]