It’s easier to find meaning in fiction than in the senseless mass killings of our reality, which seem to render the critical perspective pointless, even silly, at times.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:03AMKeli Goff’s series of vignettes feature Black women recounting how their hair affected their school lives, relationships or careers.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:03PMOscar Wilde meets Instagram in a slick, shrewd and screen-filled update, the filmed collaboration by five British theaters.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:36PMThis new franchise installment, “Sponge on the Run,” wants to be clever in nodding toward genre conventions. But its execution is poor.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:26AMA fund-raiser, a tribute, a documentary — and a reminder that Jonathan Larson’s musical remains especially inspiring in hard times.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:54PMThis audio series translates the Greek myth of Perseus for teens, making its hero a young man still figuring out his destiny.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:03PMPatrick Page writes and stars in a meditation on the Bard’s villains, moving swiftly through a catalog of characters as if he were a chameleon.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:24PMA breakneck performance by Joseph Potter as an embittered former prodigy carries this unnerving monologue from Philip Ridley.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:03PMSibyl Kempson’s unruly audio play takes Mary Shelley and her famed creation from old England to contemporary America. Bigfoot shows up, too.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:18PMAs she packs her things to make a move, a critic lingers over her memories, many slickly packaged, some not.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:24PMA digital four-play retrospective, capped by a world premiere, illuminates this writer’s fascination with doubling, violence and Black identity.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:32PMShort, sharp and often funny, the work featured in the “Playing on Air” series can even make vacuuming a pleasure.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:03PMA big-box store, a hotel for transgender women and a dinner party gone awry are some of the places your ears will take you to.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:48PMBrave Spirits Theater expected to mount an ambitious cycle of eight history plays. Instead it became yet another victim of the pandemic.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:32PMAn elaborate production streamed live from London makes a miser out of Andrew Lincoln and the rest of us rich with holiday cheer.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 06:48PM“A Christmas Carol” is a favorite of Maya Phillips, but this year, she writes, she found in it “a timely study of what it truly means to be a decent person in a community.”
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:24PMPerhaps no playwright has asserted the richness and complexity of everyday Black lives and language so deeply. Now, two screen projects affirm his legacy for new audiences.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:03AMIt wasn’t the year for celebration. But watching innovation flourish inspired our chief critic, while other writers found the joys of the stage in other media.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:06AMWith fewer guests at the table this Thanksgiving, theatrical reminders that food, drink and reminiscence can unsettle as well as comfort.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:18AMDrawing on interviews with soldiers and classical texts, Theater Mitu’s experimental collage is visually absorbing but thematically fuzzy.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:42PMFive Black women narrate a filmed rendition of Claudia Rankine’s heady play, which was rethought after an initial version was shut down by the pandemic.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:42PMIrish Repertory Theater’s ambitious virtual rendition of the O’Neill drama finds a family trapped by a father’s grandiose illusions.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:48PMGrooming a naïve maiden to be an obedient bride is bound to fail, or at least be sorely tested, when Molière spins the love story.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:32PMPerformers share fragmented reveries in “Electric Feeling Maybe,” while “Voyeur” brings a touch of Paris to the West Village.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:12PMAirships float by, avatars sing and the audience is the jury in this visually enticing but overstuffed steampunk experiment.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:18PMA look back at the band’s 15-year-old debut, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” a commercial success that simultaneously satirized and celebrated staged spectacles.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:06AMThis comic short about an actor and his kids staging Greek tragedies under lockdown slyly comments on links between the politics of the family and the state.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:42PMIn this brief but eerie installation, one viewer and one performer, separated by glass, share the feeling of being trapped underwater.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:03PMA naïve young woman struggles with the pitfalls of intimacy in the digital age, on and off the battlefield of a multiplayer online game.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:48PMThe second grouping of these excellent “Here We Are” monologues includes a raucous report from outer space and a small gem from Lynn Nottage.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:54PMSix months dark. Thousands of artists out of work. Could this disaster have a surprise ending? Five critics on what must change, onstage and off.
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