THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it's difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics ca…
GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one's character than one's crime is the subtext of Marie Jones's play Fly Me to the Moon, an entertaining…
IT AIN'T MOZART Louis Nowra's Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself …
EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE "I'd rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another," says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley's outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a couple's love…
FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, ANDÂ FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite…
HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin's new play Final Analysis, came out o…
RICE MILK Vassily Sigarev's powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local y…
FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the…
FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell's play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant young…
HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of …
THE GOOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER Watching The Amoralists' production of Derek Ahonen's entertaining new play The Bad and The Better, an image comes to mind of a virtuoso juggling act, wi…
MORE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS When making a show consisting of several short plays about the disabled, one must be concerned, it seems, with the possibility of the whole thing becom…
THEATER NOIR: STYLE VS. SUBTEXT Supreme command of stagecraft is evident in every aspect of Somerled Charitable Foundation's production of Jim Henry's initially riveting but ultimately unsat…
THIS IS LIFETIME TV AS THEATER In Megan Hart's first full-length play This is Fiction, Amy (Aubyn Philanbaum) is on the verge of signing the contract to publish her first book when she panic…
THE VANYA EXPERIMENT The wunderkinds of American theater, Annie Baker and Sam Gold, ages 31 and 34 respectively, follow up their earlier collaborations, among them Ms. Baker's remarkably suc…
DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; kn…
THEATER AS COLLECTIVE DREAM The band is already playing, the show underway, as we enter The Kitchen Theatre by way of the stage, which is set up like the parlor of a mystic or a fortunetelle…
CHILDREN OF HOPE AND SORROW We enter the theater, which has been configured thrust-style like an amphitheater, and take our seats. The tiny stage below has an unfinished cement floor, a smal…
THE HOUSE OF LOVE AND MUSIC Many artists, being generally unsuited for life in normal society, have often dreamed of a place where they could be with others of their ilk. Where they would be…
IN PURSUIT OF DRAMA Beneath the stairwell sign assuring guests that all cigarettes smoked on stage are herbal, the following sign might as well have been posted regarding The Roundabout's ne…
PICKING THROUGH AMBIGUITIES In Harold Pinter's purposefully ambiguous The Caretaker (1960), currently playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, Davies (Jonathan Pryce) is a tran…
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP Americans love popular stories of miracles and redemption. And really, who doesn't? Few things are more gratifying than God taking time out of His schedule to break all …