85 stories from Blank New World
Trudi Jackson and Mark Rice-Oxley in Playing With Grown Ups.Although Playing with Grown Ups isn't entirely successful as a play, it's refreshing to see a completely unsentimental look at mot…
Rosie Perez and David in Fish in the Dark.I didn't expect to enjoy Fish in the Dark as much as I did. That's not to say I had a great time. Larry David's Broadway debut as actor and author i…
I was late to the party in discovering Richard Nelson's Apple Family Plays. I caught only the last two during their Off Broadway runs at the Public Theater. So I was delighted to hear that o…
Religion isn't really my thing, but that didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Renee Calarco's The Religion Thing, currently on the boards at the Cell thanks to Project Y Theatre, origi…
The Mint Theater strays from its usual diet of British and Irish drama with a French curiosity from 1930 called Donogoo, about a South American land scheme. But comedy doesn't always transla…
Memorable performances sometimes pop up where you don't expect them. Sheridan's The Rivals is best known as the play that features the word-misusing Mrs. Malaprop, but the best performances …
There's been some kvetching about the number of King Lears treading the boards of New York theaters this season, but I don't mind at all. Maybe it's because it takes me awhile to fully proce…
Cuban playwright Eduardo Machado usually writes about his heritage, but Worship is about the often unhealthy, tumultuous relationship between students and the mentors they, well, worship. It…
Similarities abound between Marty, Paddy Chayefsky's best-known work from the 1950s, and Middle of the Night, a less-familiar play from that same decade, now being revived Off Broadway by th…
Irish Rep's new musical, about convicts bound for Australia, has a book by Thomas Keneally (Schindler's List), music and lyrics by Larry Kirwan (the group Black 47) and direction and design …
I wasn't sure I was in the mood for two and a half hours of Tom Stoppard on the chilly night that I caught the Acting Company's production of his Rosencrantz abd Guildenstern Are Dead, but m…
The plucky little Pearl Theatre Company has survived 30 years in the Off Broadway trenches, an amazing feat. To mark the occasion, Terrence McNally was commissioned to write a play that pays…
CSC's nervy, nontraditional Romeo & Juliet, which I caught at a Sunday matinee a month after I saw the current Broadway revival, is a welcome surprise. I didn't expect it to be universally e…
The scion of a wealthy family moves to New York to become a playwright. That's the premise of George Kelly's Philip Goes Forth, as well as the dramatist's own biography. But while things wen…
How can a play that features a 9/11 terrorist fucking a Ponzi-scheme master in ass be as tame and trite as Lee Blessing's A User's Guide to Hell, featuring Bernard Madoof? Given the current …
Should I ever be lucky enough to get on the TARDIS, time-travel back to early-20th-century Vienna, and meet Freud, Mahler and others of their ilk, I would hope they wouldn't be as dull as th…
Forever Tango...whether you see that as a promise or a threat all depends on your affinity for the hot Latin dance and those who perform it. Mine wasn't strong enough to be sustained by this…
That film and television now fulfill a role that theater once played is not such a bad thing. Case in point: There's no longer a need for playwrights like Sidney Howard to be quite so overt …
Lots of theaters (though certainly not enough of them) introduce their audiences to new playwrights, but not many can say they introduce their audiences to "new" playwrights who died 40 year…
Am I the only one who didn't see why Bob Glaudini's Jack Goes Boating received the all the praise that it did when it played Off Broadway several years ago? It seemed like Steppenwolf-lite: …
I almost never tire of dry, quirky, understated Canadian humor, and when that is the main thrust of The Drawer Boy, Michael Healey's play is a delight. But this tale of two farmers with a my…
Think formalizing your final will is one of life's more soporific labors. I'm afraid it's not much more interesting watching Shakespeare accomplish the task in The Last Will, Robert Brustein…
When I heard this morning that Arthur Darvill was stepping into one of the lead roles in the Broadway production of Once, I was sure I missed a press release or three. Surely producers knew …
It sounds gimmicky, but I was really impressed with the creepy, evocative Macbeth now on Broadway, in which Alan Cumming gets to stretch his Shakespeare muscles by playing all of the major c…
Until I saw Zero Hour, a solo biodrama about the brilliant, difficult Zero Mostel, a few years back, I wasn't aware that Jerome Robbins had given names of suspected communists to the House U…
