Well, first you'll want to know about the star: sleek of hair and body, effortlessly graceful, vulnerable and jaded by turns, but perhaps rather tubbier than anticipated. I speak, of course, of the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany's, played on the night ...
During This House, James Graham's sly, acerbic survey of government tumult throughout 1970s Britain, one politico remarks that parliamentary democracy "is one of the few things this country has manufactured and exported that hasn't been sent back." ...
Although the band broke up three decades ago, Abba continues to reverberate across cultural frontiers. Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has cribbed the title of the Swedish pop giants' final album, The Visitors, recorded when the foursome was dis...
A quote I often find myself recalling comes from the sociologist Erving Goffman: "Nothing exists like another person for bringing alive the world within oneself." Goffman, whose writings greatly influenced some key theater figures of the 1960s, incl...
For Ann Richards, a Depression kid who rose to become an outspokenly liberal Democratic governor of Texas, everything in life was a challenge by which she refused to be fazed. A whip-smart woman with an epigrammatic, country-accented tongue and a no...
Target Margin, the experimental theater company led by artistic director David Herskovits, never takes the easier route when a twistier one presents itself. Take the title of its latest work, a translation of Peretz Hirschbein's Yiddish play Di Pust...
Sometimes a play's very datedness becomes reason enough to revisit it--and to be heartened to live in world where that play's concerns now seem almost foreign. A.R. Gurney penned The Old Boy in 1991, a time when it was an act of bravery for a candid...
For a comedy-drama about an African-American brother and sister trying to run an after-hours joint out of their basement, Dominique Morisseau's Detroit '67, at the Public Theater, requires a surprising amount of stage blood. Every scene takes place ...
What to do when your husband is dead, a revolution is raging in the streets--and your new monologue just isn't working? In Neva--written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Caldern, and now playing at the Public--we travel to politically t...
The stories found in our history books aren't always exactly true. Little Lord's Pocahontas, and/or America, currently at the Bushwick Starr, uses the famous colonial story of the feisty Native American princess to illustrate the misconceptions our ...
The improbably named Liz Magic Laser (yes, that really is her name) is a 21st-century Paddy Chayefsky. A hugely talented, unlikely 31-year-old art star who became famous in 2011 for staging I Feel Your Pain--a piece of interactive theater combining ...
Art is unjust. Its first rule is that there are no rules, and its second is that, if you don't have some to follow while you're creating it, a royal mess will probably result. This week, two new editions of old musicals are cases in point. One sets ...
It can't be a coincidence that "one-upmanship" has that "man" right in the middle of it, can it? Guys' hopeless need to trump each other powers the bravura (bro-vura?) comedy of Bill Irwin and David Shiner's Old Hats, a vaudevillian lark that's all ...
Everybody loves Falstaff. The rotund knight--his appetite for life as large as his corpulent body, his respect for truth and conventional morality as small as his desire to pay his bar tab--is one of Shakespeare's best-beloved creations. He's so viv...
To glimpse Donyale Werle's set for Rajiv Joseph's The North Pool at the Vineyard is to return to the futility, pettiness, and misery of high school. (And I actually liked my high school.) Joseph locates this contrived two-hander in the office of Vic...
She clambers up through a trap door, emerging onstage with a collection of tatty faceless dummies in tow. They're swathed in duct tape, and names are stenciled on their chests: One is John (her first husband), another Bobby (his brother), and a third...
We get ourselves through the monotony of daily life however we can. The stories told about high-school football are filled with bigger hits. The memory of our first kiss tastes a bit sweeter. We lie to ourselves simply because it's often just easier ...
"Authors are just notoriously difficult," says the publicity director in Jessica Francis Kane's story "How to Become a Publicist" from her 2002 collection Bending Heaven. While this might be true of some writers, we can't imagine anyone saying it of ...
In the opening scene of Lucy Loves Me, at INTAR Theatre, Milton (Gerardo Rodriguez, deliciously perverse) a bachelor in a robe, wrings a bleeding chicken into the bathtub. Then, stripping to a thong, Milton spread-eagles over the tub and mimes inter...
The recent New Museum exhibition "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" has launched a wave of multi-culti, identity-politics nostalgia that deserves a bracing antidote. That antidote exists, thank God, in a fantastic uptown painting ex...
The Film Society Can't Quite Make the Leap From Past to Present
What happens to a political play that's three decades old? Can it keep its emotional charge, or does it wither when its social relevance fades? You may be asking these… More >>
Blame It on Magritte
You might assume that the Photoshop fantasias of our age would make the visual conundrums of René Magritte's pre-war paintings feel quaint. Certainly the beguiling originality of his fractured figures… More >>
Deceptive Practices: The Glass Menagerie's Poignant Con Game
The theater is a swindle, an exercise in sham. Every play operates on principles of treachery: Flimsy set pieces substitute for solid spaces; people assume names and accents other than… More >>
Not What Happened: A Meditation on Truth and Historical Accuracy
Provocations don't come much gentler than Ain Gordon's Not What Happened, which concluded a brief run at BAM's Next Wave Festival. A meditation on truth and historical accuracy, directed by… More >>
Arguendo Is Full of Supremely Naughty Charm
Who knew Supreme Court justices have such complicated, libidinous inner lives? Anthony Kennedy muses on adults-only car washes. Sandra Day O'Connor contemplates pornographic videos. Antonin Scalia obsesses over nude opera.… More >>
Tragic Lovers Get Teenage Kicks in Romeo and Juliet Revival
The ardor animating the latest Romeo and Juliet seems less the marriage of true minds than the commingling of hot bods. In David Leveaux's revival at Broadway's Richard Rodgers, Orlando… More >>
The Propeller Group Take on the Art World's Celebrity Fixation
"Are celebrities the new art stars?" asked a Newsweek cover story in July. A few months later, certain windy developments (or popcorn farts) that passed for world-shaking events on TMZ… More >>
Q&A: Mario Alberto Zambrano on Taking the Leap From Dancer to Novelist With Lotería
The game Lotería can best be described as a Mexican version of bingo, but instead of numbers, each card bears a striking image, such as beautiful sea goddess La Sirena… More >>
Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Latest Movingly Illustrates a Sexual Awakening
Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times: Episodes 4.5 and 5—at this year’s Crossing the Line Festival—are the newest installments in an epic performance depicting the life story of Kristin… More >>
Anna Nicole: A Cautionary Tale Against Gigantic Breast Implants
What homeless diva recently threatened to commit suicide if her rich patrons didn't cough up $20 million by the end of the year? That's right—the New York City Opera. So… More >>
