Towards the end of Arrivals & Departures, Alan Ayckbourn’s seventy-seventh play (the author is seventy-five), the military handler Ez (Elizabeth Boag) tells Barry (Kim Wall), the man she is handling, that they have nothing in common. “We’ll never know now, will we?” Barry asks, a line that epitomizes Mr. Ayckbourn’s central concern. In the main action of Arrivals […]
Read more
“Like one swallow,” wrote John Simon when reviewing the premiere of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “one Shakespeare does not make a summer.” Fortunately, for the first time since 2011, Shakespeare in the Park is eschewing musicals for two revivals from the Bard. This year, they are presenting Much Ado About Nothing (June 3 – July 6) and King Lear (July 22 – […]
Read more
Berenger (Michael Shannon), the everyman who stars in Eugène Ionesco’s later plays Rhinoceros, Exit the King, and A Stroll in the Air, made his first and perhaps most devastating appearance in The Killer, one of the purest expressions of the Theatre of the Absurd. In the first act (during which the set is almost always bare, the white scratches on […]
Read more
Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth skirts very close to the kind of acting exercise you might find practiced by an improv group: in the first half, which is largely in gibberish (which is subtitled in the script but untranslated here), a builder who speaks English arrives to construct a set for actors about to perform […]
Read more