a new york-based theater blog
The stage is in the round, with some audience members sitting right up next to the performers. When one of the cast speaks, the remaining six sit and watch, rapt. Each of their dresses (created by Toni-Leslie James) is printed with the face of a female relative, blurring the distinction between their lives and their […]
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Soft Power, the new musical by David Henry Hwang, is about sixteen different shows stuffed into one, so bear with me here. It begins with the playwright himself (Francis Jue), who is approached by Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora), the President for North America of Dragon Entertainment Group, to adapt the Chinese comedy Jiāng Cuò Jiù […]
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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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