a new york-based theater blog
Despite every indication that he should try his luck in a less barren locale, chain restaurant manager Eddie (T.R. Knight) clings to his hometown of Pocatello. His franchise is failing, his family is vocally disinterested in spending time with him and his romantic prospects as a single gay man in a foundering Midwestern town are […]
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Ayad Akhtar, whose excellent Disgraced won the Pulitzer last year and transferred to Broadway this year, is quickly becoming one of the most important (if not the most important) new voices in contemporary American theater. His follow-up, The Invisible Hand, currently running at the New York Theatre Workshop, is thematically consistent with the last work but narratively superior, more emotionally […]
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Daisy and Violet Hilton (Erin Davie and Emily Padgett) were a pair of British conjoined twins who found success in the United States as a vaudeville act in the 1930s and eventually appeared in Tod Browning’s Freaks and the later, more exploitative Chained for Life. Side Show, the musical based on the Hiltons’ lives, was a commercial failure when […]
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I have a friend who says that as a kid, he had trouble understanding the expression “suspension of disbelief,” because he had no disbelief to suspend: Jurassic Park made as much sense to him as Clarissa Explains It All. This is the ideal state for a viewer of The Illusionists: Witness the Impossible, an endlessly silly […]
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In Sam Shepard’s A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), Sophocles’ tragedy has been rewritten (with Irish accents) and then paired with a modern variation set in California, where the past is reconstructed through forensic evidence and kingdoms are measured in Chevy dealerships. Stephen Rea plays both Oedipus and Otto, the latter an elderly amateur crime […]
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