Popular culture—or at least English-language popular culture—has been rather silent about the Khmer Rouge. Apart from The Killing Fields, a British film starring mostly British and American actors, there have been few onscreen attempts to reconcile with Pol Pot’s regime. Oddly, Angelina Jolie has figured in two, first as an actor and then as a […]
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In the summer of 1960, the metalworker Bird Wilson (Suazanne Darrell) takes in the orphaned daughter of her former lover. The daughter, Alma Jean Pierson (Ashley Noel Pierson), immediately runs afoul of Bird’s authority; the mother, Belle Pierson (Kayland Jordan), appears through a series of flashbacks. Meanwhile, Bird’s girlfriend, the loving and very-much-living Louise Sterling […]
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The stage is divided into three, each section dedicated to a different character at a different point in time. On stage right, Carol (Carla Gugino) is speaking to her husband, John (Richard Topol), for the first time since she slit her writs, took pills, and drank gin in a bathtub with the water left running. […]
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Angel Allen (Alfie Fuller), who used to be a back-up singer at the Cotton Club, has just been fired from her most recent gig. She arrives home drunk, carried for at least the last two blocks by her friend Guy Jacobs (John-Andrew Morrison) and a handsome stranger, Leland Cunningham (Khiry Walker). Guy is a costume […]
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The first and most important thing about Yaël Farber’s revival of Hamlet is that it is one of the best-spoken Shakespeares I have heard in years. These are actors who both understand the meaning of the language and respect the rhythm of the poetry. They remind us that Shakespeare, despite his reputation to the contrary, […]
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As far as we know, Timon of Athens was never staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. It is rarely staged in ours. In terms of genre, it is akin to his late romances, beginning as a Ben-Jonson-style comedy and ending in Lear-like tragedy. As with Pericles and Two Noble Kinsman, it is a collaboration, and here the […]
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In Simon Stone’s modernization of Medea, the avenging wife is the former research physician Anna (Rose Byrne), who has recently been released from a mental institution after poisoning her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale). Lucas is also a research physician—one who has relied on his wife’s intellect for his professional success—and so Anna snaps when she […]
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Writing about New York during the summer of 1943, James Baldwin recalled that Black soldiers received their military training in the south: thus, “the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas.” Death at the hands of […]
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Fefu (Amelia Workman) hosts a group of friends at her New England home, ostensibly to rehearse for an upcoming educational fundraiser. The rehearsal, however, takes up little of the action in Fefu and Her Friends, María Irene Fornés’ witty, experimental play from the ‘seventies about a group of unfulfilled women who unwind and unload for […]
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