a new york-based theater blog
After an absence of seventeen years, Murray (Richard Stacey) returns home from an unnamed war, hailed by local media for his heroics during a street fight near and inside a children’s hospital. With his young bride, the Eastern European refugee Baba (Evelyn Hoskins), he has big plans involving his father’s run-down hotel, The Bird of Prey. […]
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People who are a little smart and a lot insecure love to associate with lesser minds. They will make allusions with the sole intention of being asked to explain them and they will quietly correct others’ mistakes—only doing so quietly so they can repeat the corrections louder, all the while pretending it’s no big deal. […]
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Neil LaBute has always struck me as occasionally nastily observant but mostly just plain nasty, though his play Some Girl(s), currently running at the Chain Theatre, suffers more from endless tedium than anything else; “predictably shocking” is an oxymoron, and once you figure out what Mr. LaBute is up to, he loses about ninety percent […]
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A night of drunken revelries on the eve of midterms finds Leigh (Zosia Mamet) in bed with Davis (Matt Lauria) while her boyfriend, Jimmy (Evan Jonigkeit), is out of town. Leigh cries rape—and Davis, who blacked out, can’t remember—though both Leigh’s best friend, the closeted lesbian Grace (Lauren Culpepper), and Davis’ roommate, Cooper (David Hull), […]
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Brooke Wyeth (Rachel Griffiths) complains that her family never talks about anything, though you’d never know it from Other Desert Cities, a play so laden with expository monologues and near-endless confessions that it leaves its audience crying out for the subtlety of Neil LaBute. This monster of a production, which runs for over two hours […]
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