170 stories by "Tony Marinelli"
For most of its running time, "Dirty Books"—a slyly seductive immersive production written and directed by Mara Lieberman for Bated Breath Theatre Company—behaves less like a play than l…
There are evenings in the theater when one feels not merely entertained but altered—mysteriously unfastened from the ordinary mechanisms of perception and delivered into some older, strang…
Visually, "Specimen" resembles the fever dream of a junk dealer raised on 1970s science fiction. We anxiously anticipate the arrival of Robot B-9 from" Lost in Space" shouting “Danger, Wil…
John, discovered as an infant in a basket outside the grand department store known as the Emporium, grows up haunted by the place’s almost metaphysical allure. Like so many Wilder protagon…
The evening’s pleasures derive less from narrative surprise than from tonal dexterity. Sindelar knows exactly how ridiculous this world is, but resists the temptation to become smug about …
Inside, "Canciones" unfolds less like a play than like an actual family gathering one has somehow wandered into midway through the evening. The house hums with side conversations, overlappin…
The title refers to the catastrophic 73 seconds between the Challenger’s launch and explosion, and Mezzocchi turns those seconds into the play’s governing existential paradox. Had Rosema…
Inspired in part by "he Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann’s 1924 meditation on illness and temporality, Zimet’s play borrows not its plot but its sensibility: the peculiar dilation and contra…
What lingers, long after the final moments—which are, indeed, superb—is not a tidy judgment but a series of disquieting questions. Clements refuses the comfort of easy condemnation, even…
Derek Murphy’s "The Bad Daters" arrives Off Broadway from Ireland and the United Kingdom with the unassuming air of a chamber piece and the stealthy force of something far more piercing: a…
Where past and present commingle—as they so insistently do in a play like "Love Story"—the burden falls squarely on the director to furnish the audience with a legible temporal grammar. …
There are evenings in the theatre when the air seems to tighten, as though the room itself has drawn a breath it cannot quite release. Such is the case with "Kenrex," a work of unnerving com…
Van Zandt is a cyclone that tears through the intimate confines of SoHo Playhouse’s Huron Club, detonating with the force of lived experience refined into art. What might, in lesser hands,…
Di Zou as Pearl and Rebecca De Mornay as Evelyn in a scene from John Patrick Shanley's "The Pushover" at the Chain Theater (Photo credit: Dan Wright Photography) Encountering a John Patrick …
In Luke Murphy's astonishing "Scorched Earth," a vitality is rendered with a ferocity that feels at once ancient and bracingly new. Murphy, working under the banner of his multidisciplinary …
For all its incremental gestures toward inclusivity, "Saturday Night Live""now improbably in its 51st season"has remained curiously bereft of a regular South Asian cast member, a lacuna that…
The narrative architecture of "Vanya""its languors, its longings"is assumed, even beside the point. In its essence, this distilled adaptation unfolds less as a conventional staging than as a…
There is, in "The Last Audition," something almost defiantly modest"a chamber piece of sorrow that refuses the grandiloquence of tragedy even as it circles one. The play, a solo vehicle of h…
Hayes proves wholly persuasive, gliding among a gallery of supporting figures (Hayes delineates 11 distinct characters with astonishing lucidity, his transitions so fluid they seem almost in…
Yet the production proves curiously reluctant to pursue the implications of its own provocations. The philosophers, rather than evolving into distinct and dynamically opposed sensibilities, …
New American Ensemble may be young, but this production announces a company of rare precision and ambition. Every element"the mulch underfoot, the bar at your shoulder, the dead tree overhea…
Anthony Rapp in Kenny Finkle's "Touch" at The East Village Basement (Photo credit: Table 7 Strategies/Kevin Kulp) In Touch, a work of disarming modesty and unnerving emotional precision, a l…
In the hands of Michael John LaChiusa (music, lyrics and book) and George C. Wolfe (book), the feral, syncopated verse of Joseph Moncure March's Prohibition-era poem is not so much adapted a…
In "Entangled:12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico," the beguiling and philosophically mischievous collaboration between Mona Mansour and Emily Zemba, the American desert becom…
What begins as a satirical clash between corporate swagger and academic idealism gradually deepens into a more unsettling inquiry. The play's true subject, it turns out, is not merely the ar…
