One of Eugene O’Neill’s earliest successes, The Emperor Jones finds its title character ruling an unnamed island in the Caribbean. Having fled American justice, Brutus Jones (Obi Abili) exploits the superstitions of the local population to squeeze them dry, convincing them he can only be killed by a silver bullet. When the Cockney trader Henry Smithers (Andy Murray) […]
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“We’ve been having the same conversation for twenty years,” Tracey (Johanna Day) complains early on in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. She and her friends, Cynthia (Michelle Wilson) and Jessie (Alison Wright), have worked in the same factory in Reading, Pennsylvania, since their teens. Most of their fathers worked at the plant, too.
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“Forty years will pass in the course of a few minutes,” Hong (Brian Lee Huynh) says toward the end of The Light Years, a magical new play by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen that is currently running at Playwrights Horizons. Hong immigrated to the United States to work for the engineer Hillary (Erik Lochtefeld), who has been commissioned […]
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The way Adam (James Kautz) remembers it, back in 1992, he was part of a cohesive group of beer-drinking miscreants with high school diplomas. Then everybody changed. Seemingly overnight, his friends became entirely different people. Their collective ambivalence about the future disappeared and each of them broke off into distinctive, driven personalities. Maybe Adam’s friends […]
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Ten years after the premiere of his play, Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars, Robert (Matthew Broderick) gets together with his cast and crew at their old haunt, the Talk House. Robert and his star, Tom (Larry Pine), have moved on to a sitcom, Tony and Company. Producer Bill (Michael Tucker) has become a talent agent, […]
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About two thirds of the way through Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis (Michael Xavier) exits a swimming pool to reveal the kind of body that requires eight hours a day at the gym. Mr. Xavier is a good singer and dancer, but this moment captures precisely why he is so miscast as Joe: the screenwriter’s psychosexual relationship with […]
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Early on in Wakey Wakey, Guy (Michael Emerson) tells us, “however you think of it right now is probably how you’ll think of it when it’s over.” He’s probably right. For the most part, Wakey Wakey is a discursive existential monologue addressed directly to the audience. It is a multimedia presentation with a calculated feeling […]
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Much will no doubt be made of Thornton Wilder’s claim that The Skin of Our Teeth “mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Indeed, this play about a “typical American family” seems unusually prescient. Eschewing traditional narrative and chronological structure, The Skin of Our Teeth follows the Antrobuses through three fraught periods in human (and mythological) history. In […]
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