Email Author John Beer

2007 Stories by John Beer

• Spurn's Sketch Marks

  published November 20, 2007

  A week of striking writers has reduced you to chuckling along with Jimmy Kimmel ad libs. Spurn X, the 10th outing by a sketch-comedy troupe... More >>

• Sean Graney's The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide

  published November 13, 2007

  In a Chicago landscape of actors' showpieces and unapologetic realism, Sean Graney and his company, the Hypocrites, stand out because of their... More >>

• When the Messenger Is Hot

  published October 9, 2007

  Elizabeth Crane's 2003 debut collection of stories, When the Messenger Is Hot, offered the unusual combination of experimental forms... More >>

• The Rockae

  published September 25, 2007

  To paraphrase Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, there's a thin line between genius and stupid, one that Peter Mills and Cara Reichel walk with flair in... More >>

• Stoppard Goes Electric

  published September 11, 2007

  No stranger to success, Tom Stoppard is nonetheless enjoying a banner period in New York. So Boomerang Theatre Company has smartly timed this... More >>

• Trouble in Store

  published September 4, 2007

  Bigger isn't always better. First a one-act in Madison, Wisconsin, then a hit at last year's Fringe, Walmartopia has metastasized into a... More >>

• On the Couch

  published July 31, 2007

  With its comfy chairs and amiable atmosphere, Here's American Living Room festival aims to invest cutting-edge theater with the cozy familiarity... More >>

• L.E.S. Soundsystem

  published July 24, 2007

  33 to Nothing may do its bastard subgenre-—the rock-and-roll-rehearsal play—as well as it can be done. If so, the painful... More >>

• King Me

  published July 10, 2007

  One would need a helium-filled heart for it not to sink at the mention of an operetta based on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. Like a jazz... More >>

• Mr. Barfly, Ph.D.

  published June 26, 2007

  Poet Gerald Locklin, perhaps best known for his longtime friendship with Charles Bukowski, shares his illustrious pal's penchant for pickled... More >>

• Life's a Witch

  published June 19, 2007

  Richardson and Berney's 1944 chestnut Dark of the Moon has survived through the attention of school and community groups, who've been... More >>

• The Devil Wears Camo

  published June 12, 2007

  As if in answer to Tom Sellar's recent complaint in these pages about the dearth of international theater in New York, FoolsFURY Theater Company... More >>

• Tale Waggers

  published May 29, 2007

  A bunch of renegade wits amuse one another with intricate stories, while outside the walls of their villa society collapses. It's hard to say... More >>

• The Trace Is On!

  published May 8, 2007

  Will Adamsdale and Chris Branch have devised a wry fable set in a cheery Philip Dickian dystopia, performed as a spin on the classic music-hall... More >>

• Dotty-Mouthed

  published May 1, 2007

  It's been almost 20 years since Annie Sprinkle first demonstrated the performance potential of a speculum in Post-Porn Modernist. Back then,... More >>

• Survive, She Said

  published April 17, 2007

  The 1994 massacre of Rwanda's Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors may have earned the country a horrific place in the media, but it has so far garnered... More >>

• Aping Monkeys

  published April 10, 2007

  David Zellnik's Serendib travels all the way to Sri Lanka to discover that, given the chance, a multinational team of animal behaviorists... More >>

• Adieu, Japan!

  published February 27, 2007

  Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Orhan Pamuk spent most of their twenties in their bedrooms, meditating on the themes that would drive their fiction.... More >>

• Good Grief

  published February 20, 2007

  Courtney Baron's new play concerns an occupational hazard common to doctors and brainy New Yorkers: a clinical imperviousness to experience. When... More >>

• Supremacist Team

  published February 13, 2007

  For all their dramaturgical fireworks, these two one-acts by Thomas Bradshaw pull their punches a little. Thomas Bernhard—like Bradshaw, a... More >>

• Runaway Riddle

  published February 6, 2007

  Despite name-checking CBGB and Delancey Street, this adaptation of the Russian playwright Edvard Radzinski's She, in the Absence of... More >>

• Star Tripped

  published January 23, 2007

  No one can fault Cynthia Hopkins for lack of ambition. Her new multilayered performance piece, the second in her Accidental Trilogy, crosscuts... More >>

• Rocking the Boat

  published January 16, 2007

  Their downtown-theater savvy may win Radiohole comparisons to Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group, but the more relevant reference points might... More >>

• Unmasking the Truth

  published January 2, 2007

  Carlo Goldoni's 1745 comedy The Servant of Two Masters marked a sea change in Italian theater. Tossing out masks and improvisation,... More >>