a new york-based theater blog
The backbone of the Potomac Theatre Project’s Havel: The Passion of Thought—performed in repertory with Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth—are three interlinked one-acts by the dissident writer (and later President of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel. All were originally banned in his native country. In the first, Interview, Ferdinand Vaněk (David Barlow), a writer […]
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With her slight form, her raspy voice, and her bouncy movements, April Matthis owns the stage. Playing the title character in Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone, Matthis weaves effortlessly through space and time to reconstruct the story of the first woman to play professional baseball. The transitions are simple—”I’m a little girl,” Matthis will say […]
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Much Ado About Nothing is a lighter Shakespeare play, in part because the love-lorn pair, Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman), have no parents and in part because its villain, Don John (Hubert Point-Du Jour), never poses much of a threat. He lies with the Machiavellianism but not the talent of Iago. Still, Much […]
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Moira Buffini’s new play, Handbagged, has the Queen of England and Margaret Thatcher reflecting on their shared lives together. Elizabeth, despite her reputation for conservatism, is less than pleased with her reactionary PM, while Thatcher never loses the feeling that she’s being treated like the grocer’s daughter. It is a fitting juxtaposition of British power: […]
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A man and a woman make ecstatic love. Afterward, the woman offers to make the man a sandwich before booting him out of her studio apartment. He eats the sandwich, but he doesn’t go anywhere. Over three decades after its debut, Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune may seem to possess […]
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The premise of Dave Malloy’s Octet is terrific. Staged as an Alcoholics Anonymous-style meeting for device addicts, a group of strangers congregate to share stories of their technological woes through song. Jessica (Margo Seibert) admits she is the star of a viral video, “white woman goes crazy,” while Henry (Alex Gibson) cannot break the hypnotic […]
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