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MTC gives the Pulitzer-winning play its Broadway premiere
By Michael Feingold
Margaret Edson's Wit (Friedman Theatre) is a handsomely structured, articulately written script; Cynthia Nixon is a fine, skillful, engaging... More >>
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The New Group does Sheepshead Bay
By James Hannaham
If, as Erika Sheffer’s bio claims, the New Group’s Russian Transport represents her “playwriting debut,” then she has... More >>
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The Flea hosts a five-hour Sophocles adaptation
By Alexis Soloski
Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, of which only seven survive. Such a low ratio seems itself a tragedy, but considering the proud ambitions of... More >>
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Villain hates idle pleasures in a harsh, angry Bridge Project production at BAM
By Michael Feingold
I haven't previously found much to praise in either Kevin Spacey's acting or Sam Mendes's directing. So I arrived at Mendes's Bridge Project... More >>
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Mark Sitko mashes up the American war experience
By Miriam Felton-Dansky
Where do war stories go when the battle’s over? As a country, we ask real soldiers to submerge traumatic memories, even as we guzzle... More >>
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John Jesurun pilots a brothel in the sky
By Jacob Gallagher-Ross
Back in old Japan, the “floating world” was a red-light pleasure zone of theaters, teahouses, and brothels where slumming samurai... More >>
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Rattlestick stages Daniel Talbott's anguished-family play
By Jason Clark
If 2009’s Slipping was playwright Daniel Talbott’s bid for Rebel Without a Cause angst, then his latest work, Yosemite, seems to be... More >>
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Rosemary Harris stars in the Roundabout's Fugard revival
By Michael Feingold
Athol Fugard always seems to be writing two plays at once. Each Fugard play is an allegory—political, moral, aesthetic—that at the... More >>
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Trimmed and renamed, a great opera has shrunk to become a good show
By Michael Feingold
Either I am diagnosably schizophrenic, or there is something seriously out of kilter about the new revised edition of the opera that its composer... More >>
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Temporary Distortion meets Young Jean Lee at the Baryshnikov Arts Center
By Alexis Soloski
Coil, the annual festival of performance sponsored by P.S.122, has set up an inadvertent battle of the sexes at Baryshnikov Arts Center. On the... More >>
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Matthew Maguire's new epidemic play unlikely to spread far
By Miriam Felton-Dansky
At the movies or in print, outbreak sagas can be about as juicy as it gets: The race against time! The draconian quarantines! The nerdy heroes... More >>
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Bee-like aliens threaten at the Secret Theatre
By Alexis Soloski
The next time you prepare to enjoy that cup of tea or bowl of granola, think twice before dipping your spoon into the honey jar. That sweetmeat... More >>
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Optical tricks in an acrobatic solo show
By Jacob Gallagher-Ross
Leo is kind of a one-trick show—but it's a pretty enjoyable trick, and performer Tobias Wegner and director Daniel Brière get the... More >>
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Catherine Trieschmann's new play tests a science teacher's rationality
By Michael Feingold
The Women's Project, temporarily housed in the small upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, has started the new year honorably... More >>
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A critical dive into the Under the Radar, Other Forces, and Coil festivals
By Alexis Soloski
It’s easy for Americans to feel intimidated when faced with the might of the European experimental tradition. Many continental companies... More >>
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Another solo piece by the semi-eccentric U.K. performer
By Jacob Gallagher-Ross
Is there a more endearing solo performer than Daniel Kitson? I can’t think of one. Squinting behind bottle-thick glasses, shambling around... More >>
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But no dancing Chinese porn in an opera at Lincoln Center
By Michael Feingold
In 1598, while Shakespeare was hitting his prime, the writer Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) produced one of China's touchstone works, The Peony... More >>
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The Vineyard Theatre mounts Zayd Dohrn's comedy
By Tom Sellar
Americans have blundered abroad ever since there was an America. And recent theater seasons have seen a fertile crop—maybe even a... More >>
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Under the Radar and Coil host a literally moving play
By Tom Sellar
As the World Turns went off the air, but the Public Theater has a much better orb spinning on its stage. El pasado es un animal grotesco is played... More >>
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Up to our neck in tech
By Alexis Soloski
Picture a show with no video, no projection design, no treadmills moving scenery on and off the stage. Easy enough. But now imagine a theater... More >>
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The Kitchen hosts the last of a trilogy
By Miriam Felton-Dansky
Remember the first time you watched The Matrix? Remember that moment when you realized that—just like Keanu—you were only a helpless... More >>
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Gob Squad returns to the Under the Radar festival
By James Hannaham
An hour before the UK/German troupe Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, at the Under the Radar festival, four of the seven Occupy-types in the... More >>
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A new play about a charismatic clairvoyant comes in a little fuzzy
By Alexis Soloski
What is theater but an exercise in mind control? Night after night, susceptible audiences succumb to the belief that a few chairs represent a car;... More >>
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A new Broadway show gives Aristophanes some hoop dreams
By Michael Feingold
Among today's Broadway musicals, Lysistrata Jones (Walter Kerr Theatre) stands out, in ways both good and less. It's the only current musical, for... More >>
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To improve New York theater could take a Dickens of an update
By Michael Feingold
The Marley was dead. The overpaid bank execs who inhabited that luxury apartment tower had all fled south for the holidays. Only Carl and Carol... More >>
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MTC's new show goes where too many other new ones keep going
By Michael Feingold
I'm sad, but not from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The fall season ended with Manhattan Theatre Club's opening Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up... More >>
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Mart Crowley might like Grant James Varjas's new play
By Jason Clark
“The hurt gets worse/and the heart gets harder” goes the Warren Zevon tune that informs the title of Grant James Varjas’s entry... More >>
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Remembering the noted playwright, dissident, and statesman
By Michael Feingold
A playwright, a philosopher, a statesman, a hero—and an imp: That’s how I think of Vaclav Havel, who died on Sunday, December 18, aged... More >>
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Jordan Harrison's play promotes escape to a blissful pre-modern spot: 1950s suburbia
By Michael Feingold
Over time, decades become generalizations. If you actually lived through 10 years' worth of the 1950s, as I did in my childhood, you're likely to... More >>
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Harry Connick Jr. gives it his best in a big revamp
By Michael Feingold
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1974—according to... More >>
