a new york-based theater blog
Wheeler (a terrific Ian Barford) is a fifty-year-old divorcée with a new apartment and old problems. Caustic and snobby, he is the kind of character that male writers have been fashioning for centuries: a failed artist and a hopeless womanizer whose self-hatred works to defuse any outside criticism. Additionally, Wheeler loathes Trump and reads Michelle […]
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On the night she conceives, Serafina Delle Rose (Marisa Tomei) wakes up with a burning sensation on her breast. It was a “pain like a needle,” she tells a friend, “quick, quick, hot little stitches.” When she undresses, Serafina sees her husband’s rose tattoo on her own chest: a sign that they are going to […]
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At the beginning of the script for Slave Play, Jeremy O. Harris writes, “You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.” True to this directive, the original production, which premiered last year at the New York Theatre Workshop, left its audience nowhere to hide. We viewed two […]
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Will Arbery’s new play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, is essentially about empathy. Two nights before the 2017 solar eclipse and five days after the murder of Heather Heyer, four young conservative Catholics, all graduates of the rigorous Transfiguration College of Wyoming, engage in a wide-ranging, late-night conversation that covers everything from Donald Trump to […]
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The writer André (Jonathan Pryce) has recently lost his wife, Madeleine (Eileen Atkins), and appears to be losing some of his memory, too. His daughters (Amanda Drew and Lisa O’Hare) are home to sort through the house and sort through the past, hoping perhaps to convince their father to move into a retirement home. Or […]
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runboyrun and In Old Age are parts three and five, respectively, of Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-part play cycle about a single Nigerian-American family. In both works, the same house serves as the stage for an intergenerational haunting by ghosts of the Nigerian Civil War. runboyrun finds Abasiama Ufot (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) in her mid-fifties, ready to […]
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Before Pygmalion and its Covent Garden flower girl Eliza Doolittle, George Bernard Shaw penned Caesar and Cleopatra, another comedy of metamorphosis. After arriving in Egypt, Caesar (Robert Cuccioli) finds himself charmed by the headstrong, teenaged Cleopatra (Teresa Avia Lim) and decides to assist in her transformation into Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Despite plotting on […]
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