146 stories by "Sara Holdren"
It's a tricky thing to pull together a "Most Anticipated Shows" list, partly because most of the productions generating buzz this early in the year have enough resources to hitch a ride on t…
There must be something good in the water in Providence, Rhode Island. Something that encourages the growth of playful, ambitious but unpretentious, actor-and-text-driven theater companies. …
"How are the children?" shouts a woman standing in a spare, roughly furnished cottage kitchen at the start of Lucy Kirkwood's potent, aching new play. The woman is still, serious " there's a…
In 1964 in Paris, the 25-year-old Ariane Mnouchkine did what countless young theater artists, fresh out of school and full of ideas and ambition, set out to do: She founded a company with so…
Outside Circle in the Square, the winter winds are starting to snap. But inside a different wind is blowing " literally. In Michael Arden's vivid, celebratory revival of Lynn Ahrens and Step…
If 2016 was the frying pan, 2017 has frequently felt like the fire. In this year of daily shifts, shocks, and sucker punches, I went from being an opinionated director to being a critic, and…
Watching the deliberate, origami-like unfolding of Rajiv Joseph's dense and fascinating new play Describe the Night, directed by Giovanna Sardelli at Atlantic Theater Company, I found myself…
"When are you going to learn, SpongeBob? The world is a horrible place filled with fear, suffering and despair… Also dashed hopes, shattered dreams, broken promises and abject misery."So s…
Beau Willimon's The Parisian Woman"a riff on 19th-century French naturalist Henri Becque's scandalous drawing room comedy about a sexually liberated socialite, La Parisienne"had its premiere…
Enough alcohol is imbibed over the course of Meteor Shower " Steve Martin's blithely wackadoodle new comedy now at the Booth Theatre, under the brisk direction of Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks…
The Wolves are back in town.Last summer, Sarah DeLappe's play about an indoor girls' soccer team"the young playwright's first work to be professionally staged"started sending shockwaves thro…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a canonical novel in possession of a good story must be in want of a dramatist. Or at least so follows the logic in two lively new stage adaptatio…
Earlier this year, I had a conversation with an artist of color who was fed up with being compared, even in the most complimentary fashion, to white artists that seemed to fill a similar nic…
John Leguizamo knows exactly how to respond to the inevitable applause that greets movie actors when they make a first entrance on stage. He tells us to shut up. "Okay, people, stop, stop! S…
Leaving Anna Ziegler's taut, devastating new play Actually " directed with a deft, unsparing sense of forward motion by Lileana Blain-Cruz at MTC " I was haunted by echoes of sound designer …
There's a saying: There are only two kinds of stories " someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. (Who said it? Unclear.) If that's true"at least it's intriguing!"it seems to m…
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 at Virginia Tech, the university in Blacksburg where he was a senior majoring in English (a change from his original major in…
At 7 years old, Ayad Akhtar surprised his parents"both midwestern doctors from Muslim backgrounds but without a fervent religious practice " by becoming suddenly enraptured by his ancestral …
As the lights in the Public's Anspacher Theatre began to dim at the start of Illyria"Richard Nelson's searching, anti-theatrical ode to a theater"the opening chords of The Decemberists' "A B…
When David Henry Hwang's memory play M. Butterfly made its Broadway debut almost 30 years ago, it took home the Tonys for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Performance by a Featured Actor …
Duncan Macmillan's merciless, electric People, Places & Things " now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse in a production from London's National Theatre " starts with a play and ends with an a…
When you enter the Public's Shiva Theater for Oedipus El Rey, the setting of Luis Alfaro's transposition of Sophocles's tragedy becomes immediately and elegantly clear. The Shiva is a wide, …
Early on in The Portuguese Kid, the unconscionable new play by John Patrick Shanley now onstage at MTC, our Real Greek Housewives of New York City heroine, Atalanta Lagana, whines to her law…
When Eugene O'Neill finished Strange Interlude in 1923, he was 35 years old, the same age as his heroine Nina Leeds in the seventh act out of nine in his paradigm-shifting, Pulitzer Prize-wi…
Back in August, I compared Second Stage's production of Bruce Norris's A Parallelogram to Black Mirror. As I left the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center in the wake of Zoe Kazan's sharp, s…
