23 stories by "Mack Muldofsky"
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And when families become very unhappy, they imprison each other inside manmade bomb shelters. Or so Tolstoy wo…
Sophie McIntosh is the playwright behind benevolent at IATI Theater, a play set in 1917 that follows four young women living in a strict Manhattan reformatory called the Inwood Benevolent Ho…
In Sophie McIntosh’s compelling new play Benevolent, playing through September 5th at the IATI theater, there are a lot of ways women can get in trouble: poverty, prostituti…
What if there were no men in the world? Feminist authors have been exploring that concept for over a century, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in 1915 to Joanna Russ’s 1975 specul…
What’s more destructive to the human race – the threat of AI, or the reality of marriage? On the one hand, artificial intelligence seems fairly close to replacing the charmingly antiq…
What’s more important, the plight of the proletariat, or one’s sex life? As many have discovered over the years, pretending to care about the former is good for the latter. (Excep…
An aging man and woman, both alone in the world, meet in a nursing home and strike up a friendship over a series of games of gin. It might seem like the premise for a sentimental theatrical …
Imagine an essay on camp and performance disguised as a play. No, don’t imagine that – the play is too entertaining. Imagine instead a theatrical commentary on camp, with two drag perfor…
Victoria Lynne Barclay’s Camping is about an emotional wilderness rather than a literal one. Across 25 years, two women remain caught in a cycle of love, denial, and recrimination, returni…
On Monday, June 22nd, an audience of people showed up at 11:00am at the Circle in the Square Theater at 50th St. They, and I, were planning to sit there for twelve hours until past 11:00 at…
Camping is the most I’ve ever cried during a play that’s set outdoors. Based on the title, I thought the show might have something to do with nature – you know, the wonderment of se…
In playwright Catherine Weingarten’s I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappé!!!, a young woman’s craving for a limited-edition and highly caloric Starbucks beverage becomes a sharp and satirical expl…
Relationships make people crazy, and sometimes, in order to get your sanity back, you have to do something a little crazy yourself. To quote Lena Dunham from her recently released memoir: �…
You might think it’s impossible to turn a melodrama about young women, struggling with mental illness in a psychiatric facility, into musical theater. Well, yes and no. Girl, Interrupted, …
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater has a spacious, airy set, and the lighting design is beautiful, and subtle, in the way it can make actors seem suffused with golden light, or plunged into ic…
Broken Snow starts with a young, scruffy-looking guy rummaging around a dilapidated winter cottage. He has rumpled clothes, a furtive air, and no apparent concern for the continued survival …
You die. It doesn’t really matter how, but you’re dead. You fell out of a hot-air-balloon, or drowned off the side of a boat, or passed away peacefully in your nineties, with your loving…
Remember when people went on psychedelic mushroom trips as part of a spiritual journey to discover themselves? I don’t. In my zillennial world, people take mushrooms to confron…
How can you trust a man who lies about doing yoga? In the intimate one-man-show Touch, directed by Jonathan Silverstein and written by playwright Kenny Finkle, the actor Anthony Rapp deliver…
Why do couples stay together? Mutual comfort? Desire? Self-destructive neurotic drives? Is it because nobody else knows how to make that Cajun chicken alfredo just the way you like it? Or is…
Let's say you have all the money in the world. You've ruthlessly built a global corporate tech empire from nothing; it's taken you your whole life. Legions of employees do the hokey-pokey wh…
Popesical!, a musical by Adam Overett, is set during the papal conclave, the election in which cardinals vote for a new pope, and it features a motley crew of cardinals who are put through s…
Now in its 24th season, the National Asian-American Theater Company (NAATCO) is presenting Awake and Sing!, Clifford Odets' Depression-era play about the Bergers, a Jewish family, living in …
