a new york-based theater blog
STRATFORD, ON—In the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building, the tables are littered with cigarette butts, half-filled glasses of liquor, and empty Chinese takeout containers. Reporters smoke, play cards, and occasionally phone their editors, either to report a story or to make one up. By morning, Earl Williams (Johnathan Sousa) will be hanged for […]
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STRATFORD, ON—The play bears Othello’s (Michael Blake) name, but the tragedy really belongs to Iago (Gordon S. Miller), who has seven soliloquies to Othello’s two. This nihilistic, black hole of a character falls on the far end of Shakespeare’s conception of evil, a natural endpoint after Aaron the Moor and Richard III. No production can […]
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Sea Wall and A Life, a pair of monologues currently running back-to-back at the Hudson Theatre, are small, quiet plays. In Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, a photographer Alex (Tom Sturridge) tells stories about his father-in-law and his daughter; in Nick Payne’s A Life, Abe (Jake Gyllenhaal) oscillates between narrating his own father’s death and his […]
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When they first meet, Jason (Alex Hernandez) confuses Medea (Sabina Zúñiga Varela) for a bird, “El Guaco” or “the laughing falcon.” Likewise, when the audience first sees her, she is flapping a pair of large banana palms, like the guaco ready to take flight. But the comparison is misleading: in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, an adaptation […]
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Coriolanus (Jonathan Cake) is Shakespeare’s most baffling protagonist, an ornery Roman general who seethes with contempt for both the political elite and the commoners. After the conquest of a Volscian city, Coriolanus returns home and briefly runs for consul. But he refuses to participate in symbolic gestures of respect for the plebeians and is summarily […]
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The title of Michael R. Jackson’s new musical, A Strange Loop, refers to a term coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. According to its protagonist, Usher (Larry Owens), who speaks the line as a question, “it’s basically about how your sense of self is just a set of meaningless symbols in your brain pushing […]
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Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, which originally premiered in 1979, continues Tom Stoppard’s longstanding fascination with restaging Shakespeare. While not quite as rewarding as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the work is playful, intelligent, and—if staged properly—utterly terrifying. The first act has a group of kids speaking a nonsense language called “Dogg.” The script provides a […]
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