Over the course of three plays—Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils—Jesse Eisenberg has established himself as the premier satirist of guilt-ridden, ineffectual American liberalism. His work is littered with a gaggle of narcissistic, white idiots, and Happy Talk, his latest, is no exception. This is the first of his plays in which Eisenberg does not […]
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Different play, same problem.
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With his debut play, Hamish Linklater has written a generous work, one that offers substantial roles to all eight of its actors. Like its title, the stage of The Whirligig spins round and round, unfolding a series of scenes in the lives of those who are in one way or another connected to Julie (Grace Van Patten), a drug […]
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Early on in Wakey Wakey, Guy (Michael Emerson) tells us, “however you think of it right now is probably how you’ll think of it when it’s over.” He’s probably right. For the most part, Wakey Wakey is a discursive existential monologue addressed directly to the audience. It is a multimedia presentation with a calculated feeling […]
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The title says it all: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World aka The Negro Book of the Dead is about the death and burial of a character named only Black Man with Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts). His wife, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Roslyn Ruff), remains haunted by this death and […]
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Dodge (Ed Harris) sits in his living room, smoking cigarettes, sneaking whiskey, and violently emptying his lungs into a handkerchief. From upstairs, his wife Halie (Amy Madigan) shouts down to him: about the rain, the religious implications of taking medication (“There’s some things the ministers can’t even answer”), and whether they ever raced thoroughbreds on Sunday. She […]
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Contemporary American drama is a brittle affair, stuck in the shadow of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for over fifty years now. The number of works that begin with a stable upper-middle-class families and end in drunken dinners and secrets revealed, with witty and high-brow one-liners peppered throughout, has reached an agonizing level of self-parody. These […]
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Jesse Eisenberg has gotten angrier. His first play, Asuncion, was a merciless takedown of white, liberal politics, but at its center was a genuinely warm if dysfunctional love story. His follow-up, The Revisionist, was admittedly colder, pitting a self-absorbed, pretentious writer against a savvy, Polish Holocaust survivor. But The Spoils, now being produced by The New Group at […]
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In 1791, a woman on a slave ship was diagnosed with smallpox. In order to isolate the disease, she was tied to a chair and thrown overboard. Of the 142 slaves on the ship, 121 were delivered on arrival. In economic terms, then, the solution to the potential outbreak was a success, with one minor exception: the captain, the […]
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