1,794 stories by "Elisabeth Vincentelli"
Jo sure knows how to play party games. "I am your wife, and I am dying," she snaps at her husband, Sam, during a round of 20 Questions, while their guests look elsewhere. That's one way to p…
There's so much going on in the new off-Broadway show "Tribes" that it's almost overwhelming: intellect and sentiment, love and cruelty, witty zingers and biting put-downs. But in Nina Raine…
There are two ways to bring back a flop. The first is to believe the show was good but badly staged, and to have a visionary set things right.
The "Carrie" revival that opened off-Broadway l…
Despite what Paula Deen says, there is such a thing as too sweet. But the creators of "Rated P for Parenthood" didn't get the memo, and their musical could send unsuspecting audiences into a…
Fun fact: After graduating from NYU, playwright Leslye Headland ("Bachelorette") briefly worked as Harvey Weinstein's personal assistant. Now, a tyrannical tycoon looms over her blistering n…
The best part of Katori Hall's Broadway debut, "The Mountaintop," was the very end, when the show really took flight. Most of the time, the 30-year-old playwright seemed constricted by her s…
'life in this house is intolerable," someone moans in the terrific British family drama "Rutherford & Son," now at the Mint.
But while the home's gloomy, Githa Sowerby's 1912 play is a theat…
If the skies had looked the way they do in Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo," which just opened at Classic Stage Company, the famous Italian astronomer may never have looked up a telescope. It's as…
Don't let the author's name throw you: Though these "Early Plays" are by Eugene O'Neill, these aren't your grandmother's classics.
To begin with, you can't really call the three one-act piec…
William Shatner makes most screen actors look like puppets with too many media-training classes.
It's not as if he's a great thespian like, say, Christopher Plummer " for whom Shatner under…
Athol Fugard's 1961 drama "Blood Knot" does the exact opposite of what writing manuals advise.
Forget about setting the tone and the plot early on to capture the audience's attention: The ho…
It had all the elements of a great thriller. A con man abuses the trust of his friends and colleagues at a big newspaper, lies about everything from his upbringing to his résumé to his sou…
'the Ugly One" may be a new play, but it has the familiar vibe of a classic "Twilight Zone" episode. Translated from the German, Marius von Mayenburg's black-humored fable about appearances …
Poor Meena. The harried heroine of Kate Fodor's new play, "Rx," is in a funk, and no wonder: A published poet, she works in a soulless gray office as the managing editor for piggeries at Ame…
The three-piece orchestra in "Ionescopade" has barely started the overture " zany percussion, wacky noisemakers " and already the whimsy-meter is in the red.
You'd think you were at the Big …
John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" opened in London with a huge bang in 1956, upending staid British theater and helping usher the era of "angry young men" " smart, educated, working- or mi…
The new family drama "Russian Transport" isn't edgy or groundbreaking. Rather, it's a good old-fashioned delicacy: a solid yarn, well told.
Playwright Erika Sheffer can be guilty of using br…
Even before Oedipus asks his daughter to identify a stranger and she calls him "some jerk-off," you know you're in for a wink-wink take on Sophocles.
And so it goes, more or less, for five h…
Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Wit" offers a lucky " and brave " actress a complex, finely detailed role that's as demanding as it is rewarding. When the play first opened of…
Daniel Talbott's new off-Broadway play, "Yosemite," starts off great. We're in the woods, among leafless trees coated with a dusting of snow. A young man " he could be in his late teens " is…
A lot of off-Broadway theater makes extensive use of video nowadays. In January, the Gob Squad company offered the stunt-like "Super Night Shot," in which the actors screened footage of them…
Few actors play villains as expertly as Kevin Spacey. His gallery of memorable bad guys includes a sadistic movie producer in "Swimming With Sharks," a serial killer in "Seven" and a bullyin…
It's pretty clear the Roundabout company is in the theater business, because its latest Broadway show, "The Road to Mecca," would have a hard time getting made in Hollywood.
Forget about mu…
Over the past decade, Young Jean Lee has emerged as one of the most fascinating, unpredictable voices on the downtown scene. The Korean-American playwright mercilessly poked fun at Asian ste…
Video is used a lot in theater nowadays, but it's rarely as crucial to a show as it is to "LEO."
In this new solo piece, we see two simultaneous versions of author/performer Tobias Wegner: …
