If you need a treatise on why straight white men shouldn't be allowed to run the world, try Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It rises on occasion to heights of sublime poetry, and contains more than a few brilliantly woven passages of Shakespea...

The news came Tuesday night, August 2. I had really been hoping it would never come, and I wasn’t alone in that: When people learned that James Houghton, the Signature Theatre’s founder and its artistic director for its first twenty-five years, ha...

If American theater people know Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956) at all, it's because his last name appears on the list of fifty Russian and East European composers in the Ira Gershwin–Kurt Weill patter song "Tchaikovsky," which made Danny Kaye a sta...

First, a few real-world facts: The Czech word robota means "work." It implies drudgery and servitude, not work that's creative or fulfilling. From it, the Czech painter and writer Josef Capek (1887–1945) coined the word "robot," which came into wo...

The Signature Theatre has brought back three short plays, all by living authors, that have long been favorites of mine. I should be grateful. But instead I'm rather disconcerted. In Lila Neugebauer's production "Signature Plays," the new triple bi...

At the end of the 1950s, when Off-Broadway was young and Off-Off-Broadway just starting up, a play was still, for the most part, one strictly defined sort of thing. A curtain went up at the beginning, revealing a representation of a real place, wh...