To call Terrence McNally’s delightful And Away We Go a love letter to the theater would be to do it a disservice, since that would be to offer a cliché before a work that is anything but ordinary. Granted, one could easily imagine how this play could go wrong: set backstage, it travels in time […]
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Early in How I Learned What I Learned, August Wilson’s one-man autobiography, Wilson (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) turns away from the audience and removes a shirt, revealing another under it which reads I AM AN ACCIDENT THIS DID NOT TURN OUT RIGHT. When he pivots to face the audience, we see printed on the front: I AM […]
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Betrayal is a perfect work of art and probably the greatest play not written by Shakespeare. Harold Pinter has a total mastery over his language, distilling it in a way that even surpasses Beckett—every word, every moment is essential, and the cumulative effect of his silences and terse sentences is shattering.
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The combined horrors of war and rape are nearly impossible for the uninitiated to imagine and One Night…, a new play commissioned by the Cherry Lane Theatre, makes the reality of these ugly words feel as distant as Sumer. Alicia G. (Rutina Wesley) and Horace Lloyd (Grantham Coleman), two veterans of the Iraq war, arrive […]
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Kind Hearts and Coronets was the best film produced during the golden age of Ealing Studios, a seven year period which resulted in a handful of dark comedy classics, including The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers. In Kind Hearts, Dennis Price plays the love child of a disinherited member of an aristocratic family. When his mother dies […]
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About a year ago, the Pan Pan Theatre Company staged Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at BAM. There were no visible actors and audience members sat in foldout chairs while listening to the dialogue and watching a series of light effects. It didn’t quite work, but it was an interesting attempt to bring a radio […]
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Penny Arcade has the ideal résumé for The Mutilated, a late, bizarre Tennessee Williams play that is dominated by camp. Throughout her career, she has worked with Andy Warhol, his director Paul Morrissey, and the late experimental filmmaker Jack Smith. With oversized breasts and a way of reciting lines that is simultaneously so flat and so hammy […]
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“What a joke” and “I want to die” are appropriate refrains for How to Make Friends and Then Kill Them, a potent blast of tragicomedy now playing at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. On a stage wreathed with asbestos and alcohol, Ada (Katya Campbell) and Sam (Keira Keeley) live a life of fantasy and delusion, their […]
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Hippolyta (Okwui Okpokwasili) has become something of a litmus test for me, her casting a fair indication of how serious any given director is about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An Amazonian Queen, Hippolyta’s marriage to Theseus (Roger Clark) frames the play but the context of this marriage is often ignored. In his second line, Theseus admits […]
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