Sunday, February 18, 2018
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:…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:59PMSunday, February 11, 2018
“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 f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:27PMTuesday, February 6, 2018
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…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMMonday, February 5, 2018
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 …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, February 1, 2018
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 t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:01PMTuesday, January 30, 2018
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…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, January 22, 2018
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: f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, January 15, 2018
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 ma…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:09PMThursday, January 11, 2018
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 on…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PMMonday, January 8, 2018
“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’…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:28PMFriday, January 5, 2018
It’s a tricky thing to pull together a “Most Anticipated Shows” list, partly because most of the productions generating buzz this early in the year have enough resources to hitch a rid…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:06AMThursday, December 14, 2017
There must be something good in the water in Providence, Rhode Island. Something that encourages the growth of playful, ambitious but unpretentious, actor-and-text-driven theater companies. …
SOURCE: Vulture at 07:15PMTuesday, December 12, 2017
“How are the children?” shouts a woman standing in a spare, roughly furnished cottage kitchen at the start of Lucy Kirkwood’s potent, aching new play. The woman is still, serious — t…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMIn 1964 in Paris, the 25-year-old Ariane Mnouchkine did what countless young theater artists, fresh out of school and full of ideas and ambition, set out to do: She founded a company with so…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:21PMOutside Circle in the Square, the winter winds are starting to snap. But inside a different wind is blowing — literally. In Michael Arden’s vivid, celebratory revival of Lynn Ahrens and …
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:22PMFriday, December 8, 2017
If 2016 was the frying pan, 2017 has frequently felt like the fire. In this year of daily shifts, shocks, and sucker punches, I went from being an opinionated director to being a critic, and…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:07AMTuesday, December 5, 2017
Watching the deliberate, origami-like unfolding of Rajiv Joseph’s dense and fascinating new play Describe the Night, directed by Giovanna Sardelli at Atlantic Theater Company, I found myse…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, December 4, 2017
“When are you going to learn, SpongeBob? The world is a horrible place filled with fear, suffering and despair… Also dashed hopes, shattered dreams, broken promises and abject misery.”…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:11PMThursday, November 30, 2017
Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman—a riff on 19th-century French naturalist Henri Becque’s scandalous drawing room comedy about a sexually liberated socialite, La Parisienne—had its …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:58PMWednesday, November 29, 2017
Enough alcohol is imbibed over the course of Meteor Shower — Steve Martin’s blithely wackadoodle new comedy now at the Booth Theatre, under the brisk direction of Broadway veteran Jerry …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, November 20, 2017
The Wolves are back in town.Last summer, Sarah DeLappe’s play about an indoor girls’ soccer team—the young playwright’s first work to be professionally staged—started sending shock…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:53PMIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a canonical novel in possession of a good story must be in want of a dramatist. Or at least so follows the logic in two lively new stage adaptatio…
SOURCE: Vulture at 01:33AMThursday, November 16, 2017
Earlier this year, I had a conversation with an artist of color who was fed up with being compared, even in the most complimentary fashion, to white artists that seemed to fill a similar nic…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMWednesday, November 15, 2017
John Leguizamo knows exactly how to respond to the inevitable applause that greets movie actors when they make a first entrance on stage. He tells us to shut up. “Okay, people, stop, stop!…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMLeaving Anna Ziegler’s taut, devastating new play Actually — directed with a deft, unsparing sense of forward motion by Lileana Blain-Cruz at MTC — I was haunted by echoes of sound des…
SOURCE: Vulture at 04:20PMThursday, November 9, 2017
There’s a saying: There are only two kinds of stories — someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. (Who said it? Unclear.) If that’s true—at least it’s intriguing!—i…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, November 8, 2017
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 at Virginia Tech, the university in Blacksburg where he was a senior majoring in English (a change from his original major in…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, November 2, 2017
At 7 years old, Ayad Akhtar surprised his parents—both midwestern doctors from Muslim backgrounds but without a fervent religious practice — by becoming suddenly enraptured by his ancest…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMMonday, October 30, 2017
As the lights in the Public’s Anspacher Theatre began to dim at the start of Illyria—Richard Nelson’s searching, anti-theatrical ode to a theater—the opening chords of The Decemberis…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThursday, October 26, 2017
When David Henry Hwang’s memory play M. Butterfly made its Broadway debut almost 30 years ago, it took home the Tonys for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Performance by a Featured Acto…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMWednesday, October 25, 2017
Duncan Macmillan’s merciless, electric People, Places & Things — now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in a production from London’s National Theatre — starts with a play and ends…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM 
