Monday, April 1, 2013
Elaine Stritch has a new documentary coming out, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. That’s the happy news. What …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 25, 2013
Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is so extraordinary a work that it incites not writerly envy but pride. Published in 1958, it’s one of those pop master…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMAt the end of Guillermo Calderón’s strange, new, and vital “Neva” (at the Public, through March 31), the forty-two-year-old author and director—who grew up in Ch…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 4, 2013
In the theatre, for the most part, glamour belongs to those actors and performers who wear it like a second skin—a mystery you don’t want to unbutton, let alone analyze. But the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, February 25, 2013
If you listen to an actor’s voice carefully, you can tell something about her range. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sarah Paulson, when performing onstage, indulge in what I …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThursday, February 21, 2013
Grace (Lauren Culpepper) and Leigh (Zosia Mamet) are roommates. They enter their darkened apartment, laughing. They’re both in their early twenties, miniskirted, and high from a night …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:12PMMonday, February 18, 2013
I’m not particularly comfortable around theatre people. The big gestures around little intimacies—“I saw you on the aisle at ‘Glengarry’; could you believe Al?!…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThe Lady in Orange said it first: “ever since i realized there was someone callt / a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag / i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness / …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMThursday, February 7, 2013
The big, enveloping spirit that emanates from the utterly outstanding revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan” (at La Mama) is part of the show’s essenti…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:54PMMonday, 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…
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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…
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