955 stories by "Jesse Green"
Typically, Sarah Ruhl's plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the plot…
We are used to thinking of Arthur Miller as a restless moralist: an American superego salesman with a big territory to cover. But being a playwright, he is also of course a sensualist; his d…
As you head to your seat for the new David Byrne musical Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, at the Public, you may smile upon seeing a painted stage drop bearing the legend "She was warned. She was…
The Playwrights Realm enjoyed a major success last year with The Wolves, a marvelous, eye-opening play by Sarah DeLappe that flipped the tropes of the men-in-sports genre to explore the live…
Surely we have reached the point with Tennessee Williams's great plays " if not, perhaps, his lesser ones " where it is desirable and even necessary to deploy them in new ways. They are, var…
What is Jordan Berman's problem? He's 28, adorkably gay, and gainfully employed at an advertising agency. His trio of college besties " Kiki, Vanessa, and Laura " coo over him like a purse p…
We do not question, despite their umpteen revivals, whether the theater "needs" another production of Othello or The Cherry Orchard or Waiting for Godot. Nor should we with Sweeney Todd, one…
Again with the whining! It would take a review longer than this space permits to explore how David Mamet, the great bard of the grifty underclass in early plays like American Buffalo and Gle…
A 98-year-old woman named Marie sits in a wheelchair surveying the Georges Seurat painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. She …
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins " a MacArthur genius, a Pulitzer finalist, and a recipient of Yale's Windham"Campbell Literature Prize " gets my award for most-restless playwright. Five of his works …
For at least 30 years, Wallace Shawn has been warning theatergoers about totalitarianism: how near it is, how easily we might acquiesce in it. I have to admit I've sometimes found his alarm …
It's easy to see why Stephen Sondheim and the team of Kander and Ebb each took a stab at musicalizing Sunset Boulevard. The still-startling 1950 movie, directed and co-written by Billy Wilde…
It might be possible to enjoy the musical Big River by squinting. It is, after all, based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose main events " Huck's escape from his Pap, …
August Wilson was still a young artist, if no longer a young man, when he started work on Jitney at age 34. Was the play, about some car-service drivers scratching out a living, meant as a o…
On October 20, 1981, six members of an organization called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink's armored truck at the Nanuet Mall, killing a Brink's guard and then two policemen who tri…
In a dank and grimy cottage in a small town in remote Connemara live the embittered fortyish spinster Maureen Folan and her spiteful mother, Mag, whose name rhymes with "hag" for good reason…
Barring last-minute announcements " unlikely because every available theater is booked " 24 productions are scheduled to open on Broadway between now and the Tony Awards cutoff at the end of…
Nine high-school girls on a soccer team somewhere in suburbia yack and confide and bluster and gossip, all at once, about everything from the Khmer Rouge to the relative merits of pads versu…
As befits its all-or-nothing love story, Othello is Shakespeare's most intense play, in part because it eschews his usual ADHD dramaturgy. The tragedy of the Moorish general who becomes a he…
Maybe an a cappella stage musical could make sense: The sound of unaccompanied voices in tight harmony can be compelling, and the genre has proved successful in the Pitch Perfect movies. A b…
It hasn't been a great year for new musicals; only one " Dear Evan Hansen " made my list of the top ten theatrical productions of 2016. Several others were great in part: the design of Natas…
The nearly perfect 2002 stage musical Hairspray is so hardy you don't notice how carefully it's crafted. The score, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, is of course part of that, bringing to …
In 2010, two years before she became famous as the author of Wild, Cheryl Strayed took over writing the "Dear Sugar" advice column from a friend. She had none of the skills that traditionall…
The big problem in writing great musicals is not the difficulty of writing great songs. The big problem is that the songs, great or not, are cannibals, picking the stories clean and leaving …
There's a good reason Broadway musicals traditionally leave the gangsters backstage. Except when handled with the greatest skill " as in, say, Guys and Dolls " stories that include mob hits …
