Email Author Charles McNulty

1999 Stories by Charles McNulty

• Cease and DeSisto

  published December 21, 1999

  Jonathan Larson's Rent obviously looms large for the cast of Inappropriate (Theater Row Theatre), a heartening rock musical featuring recent... More >>

• Lost in Space

  published December 14, 1999

  Galileo, Darwin, and Freud make cameos in Tina Landau's dramatic collage Space, though the piece's increasingly mushy tone would no... More >>

• Gazing Into the Universes

  published November 16, 1999

  The rhythmic build is still too fast. Sitting in rehearsal with the concentrated look of a music producer, director Jo Bonney asks her actors to... More >>

• Lending a Helping Handke

  published November 9, 1999

  Whoever said puppets don't have souls? One look into the bulging, moony eyes of Todd, the pint-size star of the Elementals' Bunkbed... More >>

• King for a Day (Or So)

  published October 19, 1999

  The greatest works of literature have an uncanny way of resisting academic categories-if not inventing a genre, they're usually obliterating one.... More >>

• Travesties Note

  published August 31, 1999

  "Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?" asks the flustered grocer Zangler midway through the first act of Tom Stoppard's 1981 chestnut... More >>

• Extracurricular Activities

  published August 31, 1999

  For all the down-and-dirty gay sex in his novels, Paul Russell is an old-fashioned storyteller. His Genet-inspired id always threatens to topple... More >>

• Welcome to Show World

  published August 24, 1999

  Few theatrical menus are as big and bizarre as that of the current New York International Fringe Festival. With a 10-day schedule of 142... More >>

• Dividing By Pie

  published August 17, 1999

  Leave it to the surrealists to try to create beauty out of seemingly haphazard nonsense. Patricia Fox and Tal Yarden, modern-day practitioners of... More >>

• Romeo and Juliet

  published July 27, 1999

  In a back alleyway surrounded by fire escapes, treeless courtyards, and the blare of car radios, Shakespeare's ill-starred young lovers enact... More >>

• The American Revolution

  published July 13, 1999

  Though history plays have never really been America's cup of tea, Kirk Wood Bromley has set himself the seemingly impossible task of writing a... More >>

• Dane’s Addiction

  published June 15, 1999

  For many directors, Hamlet represents a kind of Mount Everest—a climb every bit as daunting as King Lear, though somehow a more... More >>

• My Dick Done Broke

  published June 8, 1999

  Take a Sam Shepard character (a gruff alcoholic in his early thirties who's lost his ability to "jazz it up with women"), place him in a... More >>

• Speed Freaks

  published June 1, 1999

  Writer-director Robert Cucuzza's latest theatrical acid trip, Speed Freaks, takes place in the cramped headquarters of Paw-Paw's Famous... More >>

• Return of the Crow

  published April 27, 1999

  During the course of a bafflingly brutalizing interview, a young man meekly asserts that his questioners seem to be speaking not only in a... More >>

• On the Verge

  published March 30, 1999

  Louisville— Has the Actors Theatre of Louisville gone avant-garde? While that might be overstating matters, there's no denying that... More >>

• Heartbreak House

  published March 9, 1999

  "I can't say I'm not enjoying writing it," Chekhov wrote to his publisher in 1895 about The Seagull, "though I'm flagrantly disregarding... More >>

• The Gay '50s

  published March 9, 1999

  Melodrama has become a bad word, though it remains the dominant genre of our dreams — well, at least mine are filled with unjust accusations,... More >>

• Language Is a Virus

  published February 2, 1999

  Caryl Churchill's stagecraft has always been as progressive as her politics. Though heralded by the academy for her delirious deconstructions of... More >>

• Lust Horizon

  published January 12, 1999

  The best-kept secret about sex has little to do with body parts. Hetero or homo, it's the mortal nature of erotic love that's strictly taboo.... More >>

• Just Folks

  published January 5, 1999

  Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie traveled across America like a guitar-strumming 20th-century Walt Whitman. He roamed from his birthplace in... More >>