In an election year that has redefined crazy, at least the stage provides some refuge from politics. Well, at least until I found out I was seeing Primary. Et tu, theater? Et tu? Primary, written by Gracie Gardner and directed by Alex Keegan, won the annual Project Playwright Competition, where scenes from a handful of […]
Annie Baker’s The Flick is of a radical theatrical style; it is new and maybe even profound. This is lofty description but it is a rare and wonderful thing when a play’s best moments consist in the absence of dialogue. With director Sam Gold and cast, Baker creates a genuinely new mode of storytelling. Undoubtedly, […]
Heather Litteer is not a stripper or a prostitute or a junky who will go to any length to score a fix – but, as she explains at the beginning of her new play Lemonade, she plays one on television and in films. Litteer’s autobiographical play explores her disappointing type-casted acting career as a sexualized […]
I have only 4 rules when it comes to great theatre: – make it coherent – make it honest – make it mean something – limit blackout set changes That’s it. That’s all I ask. The following three companies refuse to adhere to this final point with their current productions and it’s perhaps telling […]
We Three is a collaborative new work by Sarah Illiatovitch-Goldman with a clever title inspired by the Henry V speech a character passes off as “a poem she wrote”; a speech about brotherhood forged in shared experience and unshakeable as years pass. If only the bonds between modern women were as simple as those between Shakespeare’s soldiers, […]
What happens when you can no longer trust the accuracy of your reality? When unfamiliar faces invade your home and parts of your life that you hold dear suddenly disappear? These are questions faced by the more than five million estimated Americans living with dementia. While a great many artistic works have been created from […]
There are similarities between this play and the school of naive art: both are flawed, though so conspicuously it must be intentional; yet, unfortunately (and often), this intention is to make a point so obvious the artist’s recourse to bad technique wastes the good. While I cannot speak for the naive artists, In the Bar […]
A Tamaskan dog prowls on a deserted set adorned with toppled student desks – a “wolf” relishing the eerie atmosphere (and undoubtedly sensing the unease of the audience members who missed the warning sign by the Box Office notifying them of the dog’s non-wolf lineage). Anyone familiar with director Ivo Van Hove’s recent work in […]