Theresa Rebeck will never write an American masterpiece, but she certainly has a talent for entertaining, low-stakes plays. Though her subjects are ostensibly serious—last year’s Seminar dealt with the creative process, this year’s Dead Accounts with finance and religion—her shows are best appreciated as lowbrow highbrow theater, as well-written, well-executed fluff.
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Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues was that rarest of theatrical events: a great political play. Her latest play, Emotional Creature, borrows from its structure—it is largely a series of monologues from teenage girls—but has none of its predecessor’s focus or urgency. It feels like an after school special and is littered with buzzwords that clearly reflect […]
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Larissa (Gretchen Mol) is a terrible person, though that is only gradually revealed in The Good Mother, Francine Volpe’s ironically titled new play currently running at the Acorn Theatre. A former wayward youth, Larissa is now in her mid-thirties, single, with a child, and reinserting herself into the life of Joel (Mark Blum), her high […]
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Depending on how much you love the Bard, a six-hour, Dutch-language Shakespeare trilogy could either sound like the seventh circle of Hell or proof that God loves us very much. Ivo van Hove, who has combined Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra into Roman Tragedies, is certainly trying to turn his marathon production into […]
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Though Donald Call claims, “Everybody likes Washington Square, even the denigrators of Henry James,” it is only through performance that James’ novel has ever come alive for me—both in William Wyler’s 1949 movie, The Heiress, and now, in a current Broadway revival of Ruth and August Goetz’s play.
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Ethan Hawke wants you to know that he’s a really serious actor. When he’s not busy mentally masturbating with his pal Richard Linklater, he’s performing Shakespeare at the Old Vic in London. Now, he’s dabbling in Chekhov, playing the title part in Ivanov at the Classic Stage Company. In it, he saws the air with […]
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It is said that Pierre Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro foreshadowed the French Revolution—though Figaro (Sean McNall) is based on Brighella, a stock Commedia character, a servant who often outwits his master, Beaumarchais’ text is far more political and is packed with polemical monologues against social inequity. “How came you to be rich and mighty, […]
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The last words of the abolitionist John Brown are reported to be, “This is a beautiful country”— right after failing to free the slaves, right before being hanged for murder and treason. A similar baffling optimism inhabits the protagonist of Samuel D. Hunter’s new play, The Whale. Charlie (Shuler Hensley), a gay man weighing somewhere […]
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