168 stories by "Hilton Als"
In the waning days of summer, when it’s still too warm to think about fall but it’s there, in the night air, I’ve been reading Richard Sewall’s essential 1974 book, &…
The show is a crowd-pleaser, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why: most audiences are reacting to its charming narrative surface. But there’s more going on than that.
Wallace Shawn’s primary impulse in his dramatic work is to fuck with the audience. Not through content—though he messes with that, too—but through form, which more or less …
Days before Tennessee Williams’s 1967 chamber piece “The Two-Character Play” opened at New World Stages, I began to experience a certain apprehension. I think my anxiety wa…
8220;Far from Heaven” (at Playwrights Horizons) is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in “issues”—racism, homophobia, misogyny—that limit the show…
Writing in this magazine in 1970, Kennedy Fraser brilliantly described a boutique that was then gaining in popularity at Bendel’s. Called Stephen Burrows’ World, it was a univers…
Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the t…
8220;Made Here” is an online documentary series now in its third season. (The entire series can be viewed at madehereproject.org.) In it, we meet a variety of performing artists living…
Once again, the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca’s considerable influence is being talked about, debated, celebrated. In addition to publishing his legendary plays—s…
8220;The Testament of Mary” (directed by Deborah Warner, at the Walter Kerr) is theatre porn. Stiff with its own seriousness, it’s a Broadway show that wants to impress us with i…
Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Nance” (at the Lyceum) is a nearly perfect work of dramatic art, whose power derives from its equitable compassion and its unromantic view of my…
My reservations about each show were minimized by four outstanding actors: Billy Porter in “Kinky Boots,” and De’Adre Aziza, Brandon J. Dirden, and Samantha Soule in the pl…
Elaine Stritch has a new documentary coming out, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. That’s the happy news. What …
Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is so extraordinary a work that it incites not writerly envy but pride. Published in 1958, it’s one of those pop master…
At the end of Guillermo Calderón’s strange, new, and vital “Neva” (at the Public, through March 31), the forty-two-year-old author and director—who grew up in Ch…
In the theatre, for the most part, glamour belongs to those actors and performers who wear it like a second skin—a mystery you don’t want to unbutton, let alone analyze. But the …
If you listen to an actor’s voice carefully, you can tell something about her range. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sarah Paulson, when performing onstage, indulge in what I …
Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh (Zosia Mamet) are roommates. They enter their darkened apartment, laughing. They’re both in their early twenties, miniskirted, and high from a night …
I’m not particularly comfortable around theatre people. The big gestures around little intimacies—“I saw you on the aisle at ‘Glengarry’; could you believe Al?!…
The Lady in Orange said it first: “ever since i realized there was someone callt / a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag / i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness / …
The big, enveloping spirit that emanates from the utterly outstanding revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan” (at La Mama) is part of the show’s essenti…
Ever since “Sleep No More” proved that audiences don’t necessarily want to just sit and watch actors go about a playwright’s business framed by a proscenium, immersiv…
I grew up in the city. And the books and movies and plays that I loved as a boy were the ones whose sense of rural quietude was able to shut out the din of urban life. In my countryside-dott…
It’s odd, but when I first saw Tina Satter’s name, I assumed it was a typo—shouldn’t Satter be Slattery? My optical illusion in search of a more familiar name says mo…
“Under the Radar” presents theatre artists ranging from Australia’s Back to Back Theatre to the performance artist Taylor Mac, as well as a temporary home to try out new id…
