My Year in Theatre by Hilton Als

Newly diverse audiences, and the New York and Chicago theatre’s energized and energizing approach to making a new, evolving, vital art form in particular, can make going to the theatre…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:43am on December 31, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Mimi Lien’s set for “Zero Cost House,” at Pig Iron. by Hilton Als

It’s curious that set designers are often the unsung heroes of a production, given that they usually provide the most concrete and evocative elements of a show. For those artists who d…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on December 31, 2012☆⚑

The Theatre: Amy Herzog’s “The Great God Pan” by Hilton Als

There’s no real reason to think about “The Great God Pan” (at Playwright’s Horizons) after you’ve seen it, and I think that’s fair since Amy Herzog, the p…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 4:22pm on December 19, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “The Heiress” review. by Hilton Als

In a way, the ideal cast for “The Heiress,” the 1947 play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz (now in revival at the Walter Kerr), would have been Henry Fonda and his daughter, Jane. As t…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on November 5, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Reviews of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Barbra Streisand Live. by Hilton Als

You know how it is: you want to scream, and then you don’t scream, as your spouse—or whoever—asks, for the umpteenth time, Where did you put this or that, did you feed the …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on October 22, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Austin Pendleton’s new production of “Ivanov.” by Hilton Als

Is Austin Pendleton the hardest-working man in show business? From 2004 to 2012, he directed ten works for the stage, wrote four plays, taught at the H.B. Studio and the New School, and was …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on October 15, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “Harper Regan,” “Him,” and “Heresy” reviews. by Hilton Als

Seventeenth-century Paris. A tennis court at the Hotel de Bourgogne, where a different kind of sport is going on: the tennis court has been converted into a theatre, and, before the play its…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on October 15, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Affordable tickets at Signature Theatre and LCT3’s Claire Tow Theatre. by Hilton Als

One of the joys, for me, of spending time in Berlin was watching how involved the under-thirty set was with the city’s cultural life. Over at the Volksbühne, it was not unusual to…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on October 1, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Invisible Man,” “Chaplin” reviews. by Hilton Als

I didn’t entirely understand what was bugging me about the director Christopher McElroen’s “Invisible Man” (adapted, by Oren Jacoby, from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 n…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on September 17, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Robert Wilson’s “Einstein On the Beach.” by Hilton Als

It was a little before midnight. A muggy night in May. The hundred-odd people gathered in the window-lined lounge of the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel had come to see the latest wo…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on September 10, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Sam Shepard’s female bodies in distress. by Hilton Als

When it comes to young directors who know what to do with Sam Shepard’s chimerical, philosophically complex writing, Ethan Hawke has most of his contemporaries beat. In 2010, Hawke sta…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on September 3, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” review. by Hilton Als

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” (at the Delacorte, in a Public Theatre production) is a disquieting show about disquiet. At first, you may be distracte…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on August 20, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: David Greenspan as actor and playwright. by Hilton Als

In his wonderful preface to David Greenspan’s “The Myopia and Other Plays,” Marc Robinson writes that it may be perverse to approach Greenspan as a “mannerist actor a…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on July 30, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Reed Birney in “Uncle Vanya” at the SoHo Rep. by Hilton Als

Whenever I see Reed Birney act, I have such a feeling of discomfort that I often have to look away. His forlorn realism—he rarely plays guys who win—reminds me of those men you s…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on July 16, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Twiggy Pucci Garçon’s “The Reincarnation of Rockland Palace.” by Hilton Als

Near Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park, young gay and transgendered people of color sometimes hang out. There, the warm air and communal atmosphere act as a kind of shelter against be…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on June 25, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Barry Paris, Rebecca Ann Rugg, and Harvey Young on American playwrights. by Hilton Als

For more than forty years, the lefty theatrical dynamo and acting teacher Stella Adler worked to bring a greater understanding of the human condition to the American stage. Her primary tools…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on June 11, 2012☆⚑

Christina Kirk by Hilton Als

As Bev, a Chicago-based, Eisenhower-era housewife with a black maid, in Bruce Norris's two-act play "Clybourne Park," Kirk gives a performance of such slowly accumulated magnitude that the i…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 5:10pm on June 6, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Post Plastica” at El Museo del Barrio. by Hilton Als

I’m trying to remember when I first saw the performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, but that’s like trying to remember someone’s first time making you laugh: there are no s…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on May 21, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Nathan Lane in Robert Falls’s “The Iceman Cometh.” by Hilton Als

Is Nathan Lane his generation’s Ethel Merman? While watching him take on the role of Theodore (Hickey) Hickman in Robert Falls’s complicated, intellectually bracing staging of Eu…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on May 14, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “The Columnist,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” reviews. by Hilton Als

Nostalgia can be such a comfort, reversing time and washing away the years of regret, loneliness, weight gain, and bad investments. “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” a new musical, …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on April 30, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Frank Langella’s memoir “Dropped Names.” by Hilton Als

When Frank Langella donned a trench coat after having sex with an emotionally available married lady in the 1970 film “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” he was telling us as much about …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on April 9, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Hit the Wall” and the Stonewall Riots. by Hilton Als

The lighting that Jeff Glass designed for Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall” (at the Steppenwolf Garage, in Chicago) is so authoritative that it feels like a set in itself. With c…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on April 9, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” by Hilton Als

I love Jesus. Yes, I do. Or, more accurately, I love Jesus for the way his story informs the work and the imagination of various artists I admire. I did not grow up in a particularly religio…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on March 26, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill, “CQ/CX,” “Rx” reviews. by Hilton Als

The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, …

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on February 27, 2012☆⚑

Hilton Als: Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” and apartheid in South Africa. by Hilton Als

The two men look as though they’d crawled out from under a rock into a landscape of broken glass and shit. Their little shack, in the South African town of Port Elizabeth, is less a ho…

SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00am on February 20, 2012☆⚑