Monday, January 21, 2013
Ever since “Sleep No More” proved that audiences don’t necessarily want to just sit and watch actors go about a playwright’s business framed by a proscenium, immersiv…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 14, 2013
I grew up in the city. And the books and movies and plays that I loved as a boy were the ones whose sense of rural quietude was able to shut out the din of urban life. In my countryside-dott…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMIt’s odd, but when I first saw Tina Satter’s name, I assumed it was a typo—shouldn’t Satter be Slattery? My optical illusion in search of a more familiar name says mo…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMSaturday, January 12, 2013
“Under the Radar” presents theatre artists ranging from Australia’s Back to Back Theatre to the performance artist Taylor Mac, as well as a temporary home to try out new id…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:53AMMonday, December 31, 2012
Newly diverse audiences, and the New York and Chicago theatre’s energized and energizing approach to making a new, evolving, vital art form in particular, can make going to the theatre…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 11:43AMIt’s curious that set designers are often the unsung heroes of a production, given that they usually provide the most concrete and evocative elements of a show. For those artists who d…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWednesday, December 19, 2012
There’s no real reason to think about “The Great God Pan” (at Playwright’s Horizons) after you’ve seen it, and I think that’s fair since Amy Herzog, the p…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 04:22PMMonday, November 5, 2012
In a way, the ideal cast for “The Heiress,” the 1947 play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz (now in revival at the Walter Kerr), would have been Henry Fonda and his daughter, Jane. As t…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 22, 2012
You know how it is: you want to scream, and then you don’t scream, as your spouse—or whoever—asks, for the umpteenth time, Where did you put this or that, did you feed the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 15, 2012
Is Austin Pendleton the hardest-working man in show business? From 2004 to 2012, he directed ten works for the stage, wrote four plays, taught at the H.B. Studio and the New School, and was …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMSeventeenth-century Paris. A tennis court at the Hotel de Bourgogne, where a different kind of sport is going on: the tennis court has been converted into a theatre, and, before the play its…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, October 1, 2012
One of the joys, for me, of spending time in Berlin was watching how involved the under-thirty set was with the city’s cultural life. Over at the Volksbühne, it was not unusual to…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 17, 2012
I didn’t entirely understand what was bugging me about the director Christopher McElroen’s “Invisible Man” (adapted, by Oren Jacoby, from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 n…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 10, 2012
It was a little before midnight. A muggy night in May. The hundred-odd people gathered in the window-lined lounge of the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel had come to see the latest wo…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 3, 2012
When it comes to young directors who know what to do with Sam Shepard’s chimerical, philosophically complex writing, Ethan Hawke has most of his contemporaries beat. In 2010, Hawke sta…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, August 20, 2012
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods” (at the Delacorte, in a Public Theatre production) is a disquieting show about disquiet. At first, you may be distracte…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 30, 2012
In his wonderful preface to David Greenspan’s “The Myopia and Other Plays,” Marc Robinson writes that it may be perverse to approach Greenspan as a “mannerist actor a…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 16, 2012
Whenever I see Reed Birney act, I have such a feeling of discomfort that I often have to look away. His forlorn realism—he rarely plays guys who win—reminds me of those men you s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, June 25, 2012
Near Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park, young gay and transgendered people of color sometimes hang out. There, the warm air and communal atmosphere act as a kind of shelter against be…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, June 11, 2012
For more than forty years, the lefty theatrical dynamo and acting teacher Stella Adler worked to bring a greater understanding of the human condition to the American stage. Her primary tools…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMWednesday, June 6, 2012
As Bev, a Chicago-based, Eisenhower-era housewife with a black maid, in Bruce Norris's two-act play "Clybourne Park," Kirk gives a performance of such slowly accumulated magnitude that the i…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:10PMMonday, May 21, 2012
I’m trying to remember when I first saw the performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, but that’s like trying to remember someone’s first time making you laugh: there are no s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, May 14, 2012
Is Nathan Lane his generation’s Ethel Merman? While watching him take on the role of Theodore (Hickey) Hickman in Robert Falls’s complicated, intellectually bracing staging of Eu…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 30, 2012
Nostalgia can be such a comfort, reversing time and washing away the years of regret, loneliness, weight gain, and bad investments. “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” a new musical, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 9, 2012
When Frank Langella donned a trench coat after having sex with an emotionally available married lady in the 1970 film “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” he was telling us as much about …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThe lighting that Jeff Glass designed for Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall” (at the Steppenwolf Garage, in Chicago) is so authoritative that it feels like a set in itself. With c…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 26, 2012
I love Jesus. Yes, I do. Or, more accurately, I love Jesus for the way his story informs the work and the imagination of various artists I admire. I did not grow up in a particularly religio…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, February 27, 2012
The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, February 20, 2012
The two men look as though they’d crawled out from under a rock into a landscape of broken glass and shit. Their little shack, in the South African town of Port Elizabeth, is less a ho…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 30, 2012
Rachel Dratch, one of the finest comedic talents going, has the eyes of a woman who can’t believe what just happened really happened, and it might happen again, so she prepares for it …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 16, 2012
In 1985, a performer named Lady Bunny founded Wigstock, in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, and the dream was this: drag artists like Bunny and RuPaul (then relatively unknown) would s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM 
