Email Author Charles McNulty

2003 Stories by Charles McNulty

• Nothing's Certain for Kornbluth Except Cupid and the IRS

  published December 30, 2003

  Idea for a play: Chubby middle-aged guy holds forth for two hours on how his failure to pay taxes for seven years mushroomed into a paralyzing... More >>

• British Ballyhoo

  published December 30, 2003

  LONDON—A week-long spree of London theatergoing inevitably results in a case of anticipatory déjà vu: Something tells... More >>

• Holiday Humbug

  published December 23, 2003

  OK sourpusses, snap to cheery attention: The holidays are here. No, it hasn't been easy, despite all the early snow, to get into the proper frame... More >>

• Acting Out

  published December 16, 2003

  If Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest star of the 19th-century stage, Eleonora Duse was the greatest actress. Bernhardt made her reputation in such... More >>

• Feathered Friends

  published December 9, 2003

  On the surface, Al and Birdy are just two regular teenage boys wanting to dodge the harsh realities of adulthood. World War II looms menacingly... More >>

• Sightlines

  published December 2, 2003

  Director Michael John Garcés takes a fiendishly literal approach to Eduardo Machado's new kitchen-sink drama, The Cook. Call it the... More >>

• Theater

  published November 18, 2003

  Angele, the ironically named character who ignites the first explosion in Dejan Dukovski's Powder Keg, sits down beside an old man with... More >>

• Club Med Alert

  published November 11, 2003

  Hotel Splendide, the main setting for Len Jenkin's eccentric drama Like I Say, might as well be called The Last Resort. A refuge for... More >>

• Welcome to Lee Breuer's Dollhouse

  published November 11, 2003

  Conducting a backstage tour during an impromptu rehearsal break, Lee Breuer can't conceal the glee he feels over his newfangled production of... More >>

• The interpretation of 'Dream': Walcott comes to Harlem

  published October 7, 2003

  The Classical Theater of Harlem clearly doesn't balk at theatrical challenges. Last season's program included Genet's The Blacks and... More >>

• Munro's Merry Widows

  published September 30, 2003

  Marie, the widowed protagonist of Rona Munro's Bold Girls, refuses to succumb to bitterness. Though the "troubles" of Northern Ireland rage... More >>

• Bitch-Slapped by Shakespeare

  published September 23, 2003

  At a high-voltage bistro in the meatpacking district, Richard Maxwell stands out as a guy with more on his mind than his groovy downtown image.... More >>

• This Farmer's A Charmer

  published September 9, 2003

  Repression has been as much a part of the Irish climate as rain. When Ireland finally became an official Free State in 1922, it adopted a... More >>

• Highballs and Some Tight-Fitting British Tweeds, Circa 1968

  published August 26, 2003

  Welsh womanizer, chronic boozer, and commanding actor with a golden voice and mean self-destructive streak, Richard Burton may have been his own... More >>

• North to the Avant-Garde

  published June 10, 2003

  MONTREAL—A stolid North American city with a Gallic soul, Montreal enjoys its quiet reserve as much as its wildness—a combination... More >>

• Beyond Neurosis

  published May 20, 2003

  "If people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must,"... More >>

• The Dream Factories

  published May 6, 2003

  Words onstage are weaklings. Consider the way music so easily overpowers its libretto in opera. Or the way multimedia images in avant-garde... More >>

• The Avant-Garde Gets Polished

  published April 8, 2003

  The plays of Stanislaw Witkiewicz provide a vertiginous time capsule of 20th-century European reality. Writing in Poland between the First and... More >>

• We're #2!

  published March 4, 2003

  The charm of the second-rate shouldn't be snubbed. Plays that comfortably do their job of gently stirring the emotions while raising a couple... More >>

• The Desk Set

  published February 18, 2003

  Has your job come to define your sense of self? Such is the problem for the trio of characters in Adam Bock's quirky comedy, The Typographer's... More >>

• Assassins and Romance

  published February 4, 2003

  Shakespeare may be remembered for his great lines, but it's the characters that make us want to revisit his plays. If the matter were simply... More >>