TRAPPED IN A DREARY DRAMEDY There's a tender scene at the start of HOMOS, OR EVERYONE IN AMERICA (a perversely paradoxical title) that wants to convince us that Jordan Seavey's lads really a…
NO CLOSURE FOR GENOCIDE Family is how history happens. As Arthur Miller wisely showed in All My Sons, The Gift and The Crucible, change radiates outward. Even, or especially, an …
A WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It's not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness, Night…
LOVE ON A LINER, OR COLE PORTER'S SHIP OF FOOLS It's still "de-lovely," but, steeped in bon-vivant euphoria and Roaring 20s' hedonism, this 1934 musical is so silly it's hard to believe it c…
HOLDING OUR ATTENTION Playful and powerful, hilarious and anguished, Tommy Murphy's Holding the Man is a 2006 drama based on an immensely successful 1995 memoir. The author was apprent…
DAMAGE CONTROL Sometimes everything old is just — well — old again: The fourth entry in Pride Films and Plays' five-show PAC Pride Fest, Hurricane Damage is a bittersweet w…
CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone and Cassandra — ancient anti-heroines with loathsome mates, a religious martyr, and a disrespected prop…
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it's up close and down home. Rick Stone the Blues Man departs from the Black Ensemble Theater's standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaB…
RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But …
BLACK AND BLUE After winning a Tony last year for best revival of a musical, Oprah's once and future movie-turned-musical has finally hit her home town, part of a national tour. As alive as …
SIN AS CRAZINESS You don't see morality plays like Everyman anymore — and not just because it's not the 15th century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good De…
BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit Million Dollar Quartet reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in…
SERIAL SEX AS A CONTINUUM OF DESIRE There's not much to learn from Fucking Men —  an unabashed sexual merry-go-round and a late-night offering from Pride Films & Plays …
IT’S LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE BARD'S FIRST LOOK AT LOVE Happily, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare's first play, is not like the first pancake — a test case to be throw…
REMAKE YOUR LIFE"AT YOUR PERIL With some plays what doesn't happen is the whole megillah. Jen Silverman's two-character one-act The Roommate, now simmering in a Chicago premiere by Steppe…
OPEN SESAME SEASON Peter Pan never grew up. Likewise Alice in Wonderland, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, Nancy Drew, Huck Finn, or Donald Trump. It's a pity people do: Why must grown-ups le…
SEA WORLD AS A CITADEL OF CAUCASIAN COMMAND Orcas, it seems, can suffer for our sins. In Tilikum — a world-premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company — the struggle of indigenous peo…
A DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE VIEW Now a nearly forgotten but seminal gay tragedy, it happened after Stonewall but before AIDS and Orlando's Pulse terrorist attack " a 1973 arson atrocity in The B…
BEAUTY AND BLOOD Guards at the Taj is, in the very best sense, unavoidable. To appreciate this grim and great drama by Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, The Lake Effect), …
OUR LOST DREAM CITY It's possible to think that it never happened, that we imagined its splendor to exalt our past. It was the most transient of treasures, with only the Museum of Science an…
THE UNCIVIL WAR Goodman Theatre's current epic won't be confused with other dramas. It explores the Civil War as seen and suffered by the slaves. Not the usual perspective but it delivers a …
A LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN You can't keep a bad man down. Especially when he's Captain Nemo, the scourge of the sea. Returning to the watery roots of Moby Dick, Lookingglass Theatre Company laun…
STRINDBERG SET IN SOUTH AFRICA Yes, it's Mies Julie, not Miss Julie, and it's by Yaël Farber, not August Strindberg. And that makes a monstrous difference. Repurposed to depict a differen…
A POWER COUPLE WORTH RECLAIMING Lest we forget two women who long ago shaped their future into our present, witness Bull in a China Shop. Written by Mount Holyoke alumna Bryna Turner, this c…
EINE KLEINE SWEDISH SOLSTICE Some 40 years after its birth, A Little Night Music feels like it's always been here. Wisely and warmly, composer Stephen Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler, borro…