Things fall apart in Sam Shepard’s True West. The simmering almost-two-hander about a pair of estranged brothers locked in competition over the sale of a screenplay to a Hollywood producer…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:30PM“What really happened with David Lee Roth at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards?” we’re asked early in Amy Staats’s Eddie and Dave — both by the play’s narrator, a nostalgic former …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:10PM“Try to blend,” the vivacious Pharus Jonathan Young instructs his fellow choirboys as they kneel to pray together near the start of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s spicy, mellifluous play. The…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMI never thought I’d be a writer.No, that’s not true. For most of middle school, I thought I’d be the next Lloyd Alexander or Ursula Le Guin. I used to come home from school and write f…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30AM“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin any…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PMTo really talk about Jeremy O. Harris’s supercharged, fearsome, and often terribly funny Slave Play, I have to begin with a spoiler alert: If you’re seeing the play — and there are ple…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:07AMIvo van Hove and his designer Jan Versweyveld have created a signature style out of putting hot-blooded plays inside cold, technological boxes. They build worlds with hard, looming walls, of…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMIs it possible to be brainwashed by sequins? I was so addled by the finale of The Cher Show that I began to imagine a tiny, spandex-and-spangle-clad devil on my shoulder, poking me behind th…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMThe playwright Tom Stoppard has a reputation for intellectualism—to put it bluntly, for genius—that precedes him like a motorcade at this point. People tend to step out of the way, eithe…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:12PMThe giddy, smart, big-hearted new musical The Prom has arrived on Broadway after a much-praised 2016 run at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, but really, it’s always been here. Its story be…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30PMBefore the whimsical, poignant Wild Goose Dreams by Hansol Jung begins, soaking in Clint Ramos’s design of the Public’s Martinson Hall is a senses-tingling treat. The whole room is dress…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMGreat Brecht productions are rare beasts. His plays are about presentation more than they’re about representation, and that makes them hard to crack. They draw on vaudeville, physical come…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PMIt’s been fourteen years since Thom Pain—a “cold, grave, somewhat angular person… a wounded, stray-dog type, but with an odd intellectual aspect, perhaps even a little frail… chari…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:20PMI mean, the monkey’s amazing. And we came for the monkey, right?Theatergoers and theater-makers often complain about criticism that doesn’t “take a play on its own terms.” They’re …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMIt’s happening again. A few days ago, I wrote about the tyranny of relevance in modern American theater, the way in which plays like American Son, whether cynically or earnestly, put hot-b…
SOURCE: Vulture at 05:02PM“I realized that I knew more about male anatomy, milestones, and experiences than I did about my own,” the playwright Ming Peiffer said in a recent interview. “I knew what a wet dream …
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:10PMThe Thanksgiving Play is one of those truly distressing experiences that make you feel like you’re caught in the theatrical Twilight Zone — because what you’re seeing is so vastly, pai…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMAmerican Son is a dreadful play — and it’s not alone. When the alien archaeologists dig through the rubble of Manhattan and find mountains of fossilized season brochures, the museum they…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM“Against the backdrop of an endless, unwinnable war raging halfway across the world, and a polarizing president recklessly stoking the flames of racist backlash at home, a generation of yo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThe story goes that when Stanislavsky was very old, and too ill to accompany his company on their tour to London, he gave his actors only two words of direction before they left: Play lightl…
SOURCE: Vulture at 08:30PMIn November 2016, something big happened, and everybody who did plays started tearing their hair out over which plays to do. I watched as a lot of artistic directors leapt to program Julius …
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:28PM“History is different when you’re 6 years old,” says Alice, a character in the first half of Samuel D. Hunter’s new play duet Lewiston/Clarkston. In her 70s, Alice owns some land alo…
SOURCE: Vulture at 11:35AMThere’s both a lot and very little happening in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. The “lot” is contextual: The 86-year-old comedy dynamo Elaine May is returning to Broadway for…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMPlot Points in Our Sexual Development and India Pale Ale are teaching plays. They’d like us to leave the theater broader-minded than when we entered it, our ears and hearts more open to st…
SOURCE: Vulture at 12:25PMWe may as well start with the goose. By the time one of the more than 20 actors in Jez Butterworth’s boisterous behemoth of a new play, The Ferryman, enters with a fat live goose under his…
SOURCE: Vulture at 09:37AMThe woman sitting next to me at the Daryl Roth Theatre leaned toward her daughter and pointed surreptitiously. “Look over there, there, with the red hair. Do you see her? That’s her. Tha…
SOURCE: Vulture at 02:12PM“There is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” —Werner Herzog“Look, Ame…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMJoan of Arc and I have an “it’s complicated” relationship. I get the magnetism that keeps theater folk coming back to her, but I think she belongs in the same box, strangely, as Macbet…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMImagine you go to the theater with some friends and then, after the show, adjourn to a bar to talk about the play. Now, there are One-Beer Plays — fine, all right, yes, it was a play, peop…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:41PMDonja R. Love’s Fireflies, now at the Atlantic under the assured direction of Saheem Ali, is a play about the landscape of internalized trauma. Its language and design create a fearful pan…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PMThe Boys in the Band have left the building, and Arnold Beckoff’s Broadway transfer is still in previews, but if you’re looking for torch songs in the meantime, Midnight at the Never Get…
SOURCE: Vulture at 10:16PM
