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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Chris has a crappy childhood—several, actually. First dad dies, then mom, and then a diving accident lands Chris in the hospital. The legal guardian takes off with an ex-boyfriend, and Chris is adopted by the doctor assigned to treat the concussion. But The Underlying Chris, a new play by Will Eno, is a cradle-to-the-grave affair, […]
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Will Kidder (Aidan Quinn), the subject of quite a few plays by Horton Foote, is a classic American loser, the kind of naïve and disappointed optimist who has populated mid-century works by the likes of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Lorraine Hansberry. Will, however, has seen quite a bit of success in his life—he has […]
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“It’s never worked,” says Tony Kushner (Jonathan Hadary), now a character in a revised version of A Bright Room Called Day. The play, about a group of Berliner artists watching their country fall to Hitler in 1932 and 1933, has suddenly received renewed interest. “I have offers!” he cries, incredulous. This is in no small […]
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