146 stories by "Sara Holdren"
If you climb the stairs to the Public's Martinson Theater instead of taking the elevator, you'll learn a few upsetting facts along the way. Posted on the stairwell's walls in big red decals …
In a notable instance of one behemoth assessing another, the director Peter Brook once called King Lear "a mountain whose summit has never been reached, the way up strewn with the shattered …
In 1999 Time magazine proclaimed Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel the best musical of the 20th century. Critics, notably the heavy-hitters at the Times, have raved about the sweeping adapt…
I really wanted to like Miss You Like Hell. Maybe that's a risky thing to admit, since it acknowledges that we"critics, humans"don't show up to plays in pristine states of impartiality. Then…
It's a lonely experience to sit in a theater feeling out of sync with the responses around you. Contrary to the popular mythology about critics, it's not fun to dislike things. It can leave …
Less than two minutes into the smart, splashy new musical of Tina Fey's 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls, my friend leaned over and whispered delightedly, "This is the most postmodern thing I've …
In 1935 Gertrude Stein spoke about narrative and the passing of time in a series of talks at the University of Chicago. "Twenty-five years roll around very quickly," she wrote, but "it is th…
Are you tired of winter in New York? Does the idea of getting day-drunk at a Sandals resort appeal to you? Does your ideal theatergoing experience occur in a Marriott hotel and feature a lob…
The world's most fashionable astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently tweeted, "Creativity that satisfies & affirms your world view is Entertainment. Creativity that challenges &…
Bruce Norris is like a skilled painter who can't stand paint. Or a sculptor who's morally repulsed by clay. He's a playwright, so his medium is people, and for Norris, people rank somewhere …
"Confronted with a crisis, what is the artistic impulse?" Jordan Harrison asks us two-thirds of the way through his new play, The Amateurs, now at the Vineyard Theatre under the direction of…
"I don't want to be tolerated. I want to be respected."So says Azeem Bhatti, the angry, suffering man at the center of Hammaad Chaudry's potent An Ordinary Muslim, under the assured directio…
I wrote recently of the blight of mediocre, self-congratulatory, hungry-for-relevance plays on the current theatrical landscape, so it was with some apprehension that I approached JC Lee's n…
There's a small play playing on Signature Theatre's largest stage.Well, in some ways it's small. In reputation, it's big. Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo (that's the legally mandated title…
What makes us think that a play like Sarah Burgess's Kings " now at the Public under the direction of Thomas "I directed Hamilton, maybe you've heard of it" Kail " is necessary? Is it the ag…
Is God Is. The title of Aleshea Harris's play is cyclical: a question, followed by an answer, followed by a question. Doubt, certainty, doubt again. The play has cycles built into its DNA: i…
"Don't worry," a director says to an actress at the beginning of Returning to Reims: "It's not theater." It's a knowing wink " Katy, the actress, is recording the voiceover for a documentary…
I am a Brooklyn-dwelling, 30-something white woman sitting in a hip Brooklyn coffee shop to write about a play about a Brooklyn-dwelling, 30-something white woman that takes place in a hip B…
Martin McDonagh's newest play was a long time in coming. In 2015, when Hangmen premiered at the Royal Court in London, McDonagh told the Guardian that he'd been mulling over the central prem…
Historical geniuses are tricky beasts to dramatize. Last year, Scott Carter's attempt to revive the corpses of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Thomas Jefferson fell flat at Primary Stages. Now, in the…
Greg Pierce's new play Cardinal, now at Second Stage Theatre under the direction of Kate Whoriskey, is a bit like its own central character, Lydia Lensky. Both are cute at the outset, both p…
Is there a German compound noun for that movie or play or show or thing you're fascinated by and even glad to have experienced but have no desire ever to see again? It's not an insult: for m…
It's scarier when Godot does show up.Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright and director whose claustrophobic, purgatorial worlds and fascination with the disintegration of language have long mark…
As much as I dislike the automatic applause given to celebrities when they make their first Broadway entrances, the cheers that greet John Lithgow"all six feet four of him"as he lopes onto t…
"Is it possible to write a feminist play with no women in it? And that a woman did not write?" asks Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, in the program for Robert O'Hara's…
