"Making My Fair Lady woke, or at least palatable to 21st century audiences, is no easy feat. Jay Lerner had a serious misogyny problem (think Camelot, Gigi), and My Fair Lady could be said…
Although "Cradle" directs its vitriol first and foremost to the greed and venality of those ruthless industrialists, it aims to offer broader points, not least how systematic corruption lead…
Penumbra's production of "benevolence" (lowercase "b" intended) continues Ifa Bayeza's trilogy about the murder of Emmett Till... Bayeza's symbolic, dreamlike style - what Wilks calls poet…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Gunderson and Melcon brilliantly capture the heightened idiom of Austen's world. What makes this writing team so remarkable, here as well as in M…
There are also gestures to topicality that feel overt and have the effect of taking us out of the world of the play. But, on the other hand, how can one expect any audience to avoid thinking…
Interview with Sarah Rasmussen, Artistic Director of the Jungle Theater, about the world premiere of Kate Hamill's adaptation of Little Women and "the stories that shaped us as kids." Alth…
Raymond is an African-American roofer who "fell off the damn roof" and broke his leg. Bessie is the middle-aged, well-dressed, white "girl" Raymond's wife unwittingly employs to make sure R…
Wilks' brilliant direction of Harrison David Rivers' "This Bitter Earth" forces us to look at the raw vulnerability of gay interracial lovers in a terrifying political landscape.
"Art doesn't unite," Vogel has said. You can't count on art to change the world " the renaissance of artists, especially Jewish artists, during the Weimar Republic was followed by the Third …
Margulies' play asks some of the crucial questions that arose from the Spender/Leavitt trial.... Should a writer be able to "borrow" a story from another person's life? And should we be in t…
As many have noted, other people's breakups are hilarious; our own are tragic. 21 Extremely Bad Breakups tries, and often succeeds, in having it both ways. The play is a collection of breaku…
A candid interview with David Feldshuh about the challenges and pleasures of writing historical drama and about new play "Dancing With Giants" now enjoying a successful run at Minneapolis' I…
I saw Jayne Houdyshell and Reed Birney in the Broadway production of The Humans....Houdyshell and Birney were so honest and real and natural that you spent the whole time marveling at how ho…
Genet's "The Maids" is well-acted but a play this obtuse needs more deliberate direction.
Watch on the Rhine is packed with topics and themes that seem uncannily vital and relevant to our own moment: xenophobia and immigration, privilege, mass murder, inequality, and corruption, …
Joseph Haj, artistic director of The Guthrie Theater, gives Twin Cities audiences a new and strange and richly tragic "Romeo & Juliet" without resorting to gimmicks. A triumph.
Review of The Jungle Theatre's production of "Fly By Night"
Little Wars, a radically anti-factual historical what-if scenario, raises the question: Do playwrights have any special moral obligation to clarify true/false distinctions in the post-factua…
The Guthrie Theater's latest offering is The Royal Family, a vintage New York comedy by the playwriting team of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Cast to perfection, this gem of a productio…
Melodrama often gets a bad rap, for a variety of reasons. It is associated with shameless over-acting, one-dimensional characters, and nostalgic or even reactionary social values. I shared s…