Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, as anyone reading this knows, is a cornerstone of American drama. It’s the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959), the…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:14PMThe opera Four Saints in Three Acts’ astonishingly successful run on Broadway in 1934 was the most celebrated avant-garde theater triumph of its age. With a libretto by Gertrude Stein that…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:10PMSkeleton Crew is Dominique Morisseau’s best play so far. It’s the most streamlined work in her celebrated Detroit trilogy, more tightly plotted, surprising, and moving than either Detroi…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 08:02AMIf nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of Robert Icke’s Oresteia, which tries to collapse the 8-hour, 3-play action of Aeschylus’s monumental Oresteia—a founding work of West…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 05:39PMKhaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner is a vividly descriptive and often gripping tale of guilt and expiation, class conflict, and wrenching refugee experience, set mostly in Afghan…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:43AMOn the way to a play one day in early 2019, I climbed out of the subway at 8th Avenue and 44th St. and was stunned to see a massive, multi-story billboard with no writing on it, just a black…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 06:38AMThe first ten minutes of Robert Icke’s 3 ¾-hour Hamlet had me worried. Icke is a British directing star, known for contemporized takes on the classics, but the only other production of hi…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 06:33AMTaylor Mac is one of those magi of pandemonium who knows how to breach the defenses of people like me who don’t surrender easily to orgiastic theatricality. There’s something about Mac�…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:24AMI went to the new opera Intimate Apparel because the 2003 play it was made from is one of my favorites by Lynn Nottage. Cards on the table, I’m no opera fan in general but rather one of th…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:24AMIn my time as a critic I’ve noticed on numerous occasions that musicals rooted in political satire always have second-act problems. They come out of the gate identifying a specific breed o…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:50AMDominique Morisseau is aware that most of her fans see her as a predominantly naturalistic playwright with a sharp comic tongue and a sharper social conscience. She says so in an intro note …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:45AMWalking out of the spiffy new production of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, my canny friend Tom, who was seeing the play for the first time, offered this quick take: “really interesting…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:17AMPaula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is, famously, the play that blew the lid off the subject of pedophilia in the theater. At its premiere in 1997 it was startlingly fresh and shocking—…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 08:58AM“Static” is one of those words from which most artists recoil. It’s typically used for something felt to be listless, inert, and boring. In fact, physical stasis is an artistic tool, o…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:51PMAn oddity of this theatrical season to ponder as we bid farewell to 2019: In two current New York productions model houses—gorgeous, meticulously constructed, doll-size edifices that spl…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:15PMTwo years ago, the British director Richard Jones brought a stunning production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape to the Park Avenue Armory that set a new bar for theatrical use of that …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:32PMFirst of all, don’t be put off by the pompous, academic title. Thomas Ostermeier’s extraordinary History of Violence, adapted from a much-discussed 2016 novel by the 27-year-old French …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:53AMJames Sheldon’s Reparations is a new play about racial grievance, guilt, and retribution in America that, oddly enough, is both very smart and completely sincere. What I mean by that is t…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:15AMAdam Rapp is a polarizing playwright. After bursting onto the scene in 2001 with Nocturne — a long, moving monologue by a man who accidentally kills his sister and then reinvents himself a…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:42AM(This post is part of the 2014 TCG National Conference: Crossing Borders {Art | People} blog salon, curated by Caridad Svich.) Not long ago, malicious hackers and an unrelenting ba…
SOURCE: Theatre Communications Group at 01:52PM