Theban Plays

Anyone expecting from Theban Plays a straightforward modernized retelling of Sophoclean tragedies should abandon that idea. This highly experimental work, conceived and directed by Asa Horvitz and created by its performers, uses its ancient Greek antecedents, short pieces of which are read at several points, as a jumping-off point for a tapestry of monologues, video, audio and music, and even painting. Taken together, these elements bring lines of thought inspired by its sources to bear on an interrogation of aspects of the modern condition. Read more »

The Fire This Time 10-Minute Play Festival (2016)

The Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival, a showcase of "early-career playwrights of African and African American descent," has returned to the East Village for its seventh iteration. Its 10-minute play festival features a strong slate of seven new short plays that demonstrate the festival's mission statement, that "[t]he African American experience is not represented...by one voice or one style," with tremendous impact. Read more »

A chance meeting in a high school physics class kicks off the narrative of Bronx-born playwright Toni Press-Coffman’s Touch. Kyle (Josh Triplett) gets to know quirky free-spirit Zoë after she pokes her head into the wrong Arizona classroom. After graduation, they marry, and Kyle channels his lifelong love of science center into a career in astronomy. Aside from some of the usual marital disagreements, their relationship brings out the best in one another, until, on one Thanksgiving spent with Kyle's childhood friend Bennie (Alex Etling) and Zoë's sister Serena (Cassie Wood), a random act of violence alters the course of all of their lives. Read more »

The Changeling

Ushering in the New Year, Red Bull Theater brings us a tragic tale of sex in payment for murder. Jesse Berger sure-handedly directs Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's 1622 tragicomedy The Changeling, the main plot of which introduces the noble Beatrice-Joanna (Sara Topham) as she finds a "giddy turning" in herself from Alonzo de Piracqo (John Skelley), to whom her father, Vermandero (Sam Tsoutsouvas), intends her to be married, towards Alsemero (Christian Coulson). In order to "change [her] saint," she eventually enlists the aid of her father's servant De Flores (Manoel Feliciano), whom she professes to abhor and whose skin condition suggests a spatter of blood across his face, to remove the obstacle that is Alonzo. Read more »

Puffs, or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premieres on stage in England in July, and Warner Brothers looks to extend its cinematic success with J.K. Rowling’s franchise with a trilogy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them films beginning in November. For fans of a certain scarred wizard who can’t wait that long, or who can’t afford to fly to London for a play, there is another delightful option to be found right now: Puffs, or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic. From playwright Matt Cox and Kristin McCarthy Parker, director of this past summer’s Jurassic Park parody Hold on to Your Butts, Puffs follows the members of the perennially last-place house through their years at a well-known English school of magic as they exist on the margins of, and sometimes intersect with, chosen-one Harry’s story, a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead without the existential dread. Read more »

I was in my local supermarket when Gwen Stefani came on the speakers:

And it made me wonder how many teenage music consumers around the world had any idea where that little tune came from. My conclusion? Not many. Read more »

How to Get into Buildings

It may be reductive to say that Trish Harnetiaux's new postmodern comedy is about love and relationships, but it's the easiest way to begin. How to Get into Buildings is in some ways a play about itself, thick with meta-theatrical moments. In other ways, it is as if Samuel Beckett directed Magnolia. Harnetiaux cites her structural inspiration as exploded-view diagrams and their arrangement of parts in relationship but not in contact with each other, perhaps echoed in one character's predilection for bento boxes. Read more »

Trigger Happy!, storytelling performance artist Dandy Darkly’s newest work, is a mesmerizingly entertaining, dark-toned foray into social criticism, a post-mortem on a still-living patient: America. The themes Mr. Darkly selected for his autopsy are in the media on a daily basis. The opinion page in The New York Times, Salon, and the Huffington Post supply daily missives about damaged U.S. soldiers returning from perversely unfocused wars, our cult of celebrity, gentrification neutering a once vibrantly inclusive social scene, and how political correctness police act to straightjacket open social discourse. Mr. Darkly's richly detailed, outrageous, and metaphoric tales examine these themes with an exactitude whose impact leaves our conventional media eating dust -- and his audience breathless with both awe and laughter. Read more »

God is a Verb

Gavin Broady and the Hook and Eye Theater company’s outstanding new play God is a Verb invites audiences to step out of the box and into the geodesic dome. This bold, visually and intellectually exciting production revolves around quirky theorist, designer, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), but it is assertively not, as the program reminds us, a biographical piece. Instead, billed as an absurdist comedy, it takes place within its subject's mind, focusing on his decades-long World Game Project but skillfully interweaving the personal and the political, the individual and the global, throughout its 100 compelling minutes. Read more »

Because Me

After last spring's excellent Live from the Surface of the Moon, writer-director Max Baker returns to The Wild Project in the East Village with his new play, Because Me. Live from the Surface of the Moon focused on a small group of friends navigating America’' transition from the '60s into the '70s, and Because Me similarly examines a small network of individuals in the context of their historical moment; but here that moment is our present. Whereas Baker's previous play included a significant New Year's Eve, its counterpart threshold here is more personal: protagonist Else's looming 30th birthday. Read more »

Macbeth (of the Oppressed)

Shakespeare is one of the most frequently adapted playwrights in the English language, to the point that Shakespearean adaptation studies has become its own academic sub-field, and Macbeth, with its gothic elements and relatively streamlined tragedy of ambition, is a strong contender for his most frequently adapted play. Aside from more straightforward versions like the upcoming Michael Fassbender movie, the film Scotland PA, for instance, reimagined it as the story of a ruthless fast-food entrepreneur, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood transposed it into feudal Japan, Mickey B filtered it through the experiences and language of Northern Irish inmates, and no fewer than two heavy metal bands have turned it into concept albums. Tom Slot’s adaptation, Macbeth (of the Oppressed) is less radical in its changes than some of these, but the changes it does make produce some radical effects. Read more »

The Gray Man

Andrew Farmer's The Gray Man sets the pre-show mood with the sound of a desolate wind, which is eventually broken by a child's voice singing about a "poor babe" stolen away and killed in the woods. Creepy little girls singing creepy songs may not be a new element of horror, but here, as throughout The Gray Man, it feels fresh and immediate. Like much good horror, Farmer's play roots itself in the familiar -- the fairy tale, the ghost story, the bedtime story -- and renders it strange and estranging. As two of the characters say, "It's many, many stories," "But it’s all one story in the end." The story of the Gray Man is framed as a story of good mothers and bad mothers, of the dangers of the world beyond a mother’s immediate reach, of the illusion of safety. It is also, to an extent, a story about storytelling, stories of and by good and bad mothers and of and by children, obedient and disobedient, safe and not so safe. Read more »

The Quare Land 

Our final review from this year's 1st Irish Festival in New York City brings us another strong production: The Quare Land, by County Cavan playwright John McManus. McManus’s two-man comedy takes place entirely within the upstairs room of Hugh Pugh's rural Cavan farmhouse (a superb set by Charlie Corcoran). The room's single naked lightbulb illuminates a chimney, record player, toilet, and, most importantly, a clawfoot bathtub. Under a thick layer of bubbles in that tub, 90 year-old bachelor and Enya fan Hugh (actor and writer Peter Maloney) is taking his first bath in 4 years in anticipation of a visit by his alcoholic brother when receives an unexpected visit from Rob McNulty (Rufus Collins). Hugh checks his mail far less often than he bathes, so hotel and construction company owner Rob has had to seek out Hugh in person to propose purchasing one of Hugh's fields. Unfortunately for Rob -- but very fortunately for the audience -- this conversation turns out to be more complicated than he expected. Read more »

The Black Book

As part of Bronx Community College's opening convocation this year, school officials commemorated the death in June of 22-year-old student Kalief Browder, who had enrolled after spending 3 years in Riker's without being convicted, a period that included beatings and hundreds of days of solitary confinement. Though Browder's situation may appear extreme, its eventual outcome is not unusual. The playbill for Phil Blechman's The Black Book notes that eleven percent of all deaths of persons between the ages of 15 and 24 are suicides, which works out to one suicide just under every two hours. Blechman began working on the play, which debuted professionally in New York City in 2012, in response to a college classmate's suicide in 2007 and with the aim of finding reason within the experience. Read more »

Hotsy Totsy Burlesque Tribute: Doctor Who

Despite Doctor Who's history of using its Time Lord protagonist's companions to double as viewer eye candy, it still seems difficult to think that anyone would have guessed that over fifty years after its 1963 debut, an entire burlesque production would pay tribute to a children’s sci-fi show. However, Hotsy Totsy Burlesque's Tribute: Doctor Who, presented by Cherry Pitz and Joe the Shark (dressed for the night as Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor) does seem perfectly of a piece with the era of internet fan-fiction and character "shipping," and the new BBC series (beginning from its 2005 revival) has, to greater and lesser degrees, acknowledged and even encouraged the interest of its fandom in its characters’ sexualities. Read more »