THROWN BY AÂ LOOP I'm not partial to dramas set in prisons; these tend to be ugly, depressing, violent and hopeless, or worse"sentimental, and I find myself reluctant to be transported to …
ALTRUISM OR ARTISTRY? Margaret's Safe Place, "a boarding facility that houses the most vulnerable students of The Kibera School for Girls" in Kenya, sheltering girls from domestic sexual vio…
MÉNAGE À TWADDLE At the conclusion of Yussef El Guindi's new play Threesome it isn't unreasonable to ask oneself the following question: What does the semi-comic attempt of three you…
TOOTHLESSÂ RUTHLESS Though useful as a showcase for the capable performers and boasting some excellent singing, Joel Paley's revival of his gray farce Ruthless!, a self-referential spoof o…
SHADOW (OF A) PLAY Visually striking and radiating love and sincerity, Manual Cinema's shadow-puppet show Ada/Ava, which attempts to explore septuagenarian Ada's inner turmoil  after the …
THEIR PERFECT MINDS Written by director Kathryn Hunter and performers Paul Hunter and Edward Petherbridge, My Perfect Mind begins with Dr. Witznagel (Mr. Hunter) coming out onto Michel Vale'…
GREAT DEPICTION OF WAR, BUT WHAT FOR? Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, written and directed by Daniel Talbott, begins in near darkness with a Serbian Woman (Jelena Stupljanin) in a de…
HOW SWEET THIS SOUND The standout theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), much acclaimed for their six-hour-plus show Gatz, among others, brings the first part of William Faulkner's n…
EVERYTHING OLD COUNTRY FEELS NEW AGAIN In Mark Roberts' delightful and moving play New Country, skillfully directed by David Harwell, 25-year-old country music star Justin is up to his usual…
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING In Lucia Cox's play One Hand Clapping, which she adapts from the 1961 Anthony Burgess novel and brings as director to 59E59 Theaters as part of their Brits Off…
ALBANIAN/AMERICAN STORYTELLING As my Albanian friend put it: "The legend of Doruntine is the very core around which the Albanians' national code of morals is organized (say those who believe…
FIRST CLASS Directed by Cosmin Chivu, the staged reading of Tadeusz SÅ‚obodzianek's play Our Class at the Skirball Center is everything one would expect from such an enterprise when put t…
PUTA TO THE TEST Inspired by the Ancient Greek drama surrounding Hippolytus, and set in a present-day South Bronx bodega, Desi Moreno-Penson's new play Comida De Puta attempts to combine Nuy…
OK KILLS In Tom Diriwachter's Great Kills, Tim, an overeducated 40-year-old loser who still lives in his father's house on State Island, invites his successful childhood friend Robert over t…
LIVING ROOM THEATER Not long ago a frequent theater companion commented to me about a production we had just seen: "So many of these shows, if (the performers) had put them on at home for ju…
JUDGMENT ON A GRAY BEACH PROCESS Elia K. Schneider stages an engaging spectacle with her Judgment on a Gray Beach, Your Process Has Begun, a dialogue-free experimental piece that imagines th…
KEEP WANDERING Always charming and energized, The Bats (the resident company of The Flea Theater) put forth yet another valiant effort, this time with the world premiere of The Nomad, with b…
ON SOLID GROUNDLING Writer/director Marc Palmieri puts together an entertaining piece of theater with his comedy The Groundling, about Bob, the middle-aged owner of a successful landscaping …
THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer's one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer's radiant charisma. His earnestne…
UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs's allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls. W…
PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes' documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emergi…
NO ONE BUT US CHICKENS At intermission, following the first act of Ross Howard's black comedy satire No One Loves Us Here, my companion expressed to me, in a whirlwind of expletives, her bel…
A BUMPY ROAD TO A STRAIGHTFORWARD POLITICAL THRILLER A deadly explosion goes off in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The U.S. blames a terrorist group they say is funded by the…
WIZARDLY THEATER THAT COMES WITH A HEART The Woodsman, James Ortiz's delightful and dark invention, which he stars in and co-directs with Claire Karpen, dramatizes the story of how the Tin M…
THE WORLD ON A SWING The year is 1948 and a hack reporter (the entertaining Evan Pappas), ordered by his editor to do a hatchet job on Barney Josephson and his revolutionary Greenwich Villag…