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 i…
"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 VJ, and by a…
"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. Then the …
I 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 for fun…
"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 anyway an…
To 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 plenty of…
Ivo 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…
Is 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…
The 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, either in…
The 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 begi…
Before 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 dressed u…
Great 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 comedy…
Ed. note: Mike Birbiglia's The New One, a standup performance opening on Broadway tonight, falls across the two fields covered by our theater critic, Sara Holdren, and our comedy critic, Jes…
It'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… charismatic…
I 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 talking ab…
It'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-but…
"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 was be…
The 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, painfully…
American 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 ere…
"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 youn…
The 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…
In 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 …
"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 along the S…
There'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 the fir…
Plot 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 stor…