Mar 4, 2022

This is Me Eating

This is Me Eating, performed by Et Alia Theater, was uncommonly elegant. The soft gray gowns worn by the women of the company had the flow of classical statuary, and the grace of the wearers recalled ...
Jun 1, 2019

MAC BETH

In Red Bull Theater’s MAC BETH, seven young women play schoolgirls acting out Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their uniforms look Scottish; a pocket insignia can’t be read from the house, but the mind fi...
May 10, 2019

Hurricane Sleep

I hesitate to say that HURRICANE SLEEP comes on like an approaching storm, but that, in truth, is what happens. Andrea Goldman’s play (co-directed by Julia Watt) starts slow, builds, and sweeps thro...
Jun 21, 2018

Last Life

It is particularly true of Shakespeare that his individual works both feed off and nourish an entire body-of-work. Hamlet is the richer for Macbeth, Twelfth Night for King Lear, the comedies for the t...
Apr 18, 2018

The Bedbug

The rambunctious intelligence of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s THE BEDBUG is matched by that of the nine actors at the Medicine Show Theatre who play what were originally some 90 parts spread over a 50-year...
Mar 29, 2018

Yerma

Billie Piper deserves all the praise she gets as “Her” in Simon Stone’s YERMA, the Young Vic production now playing at the Park Avenue Armory. By the end she brings herself to a place of so much...
Feb 23, 2018

Platonov

Penned at great length when the writer was just 18, Chekhov’s Platonov (never formally titled) was rejected by the actress for which it was written and not produced or published in the author’s li...
Apr 21, 2017

The Hairy Ape

The first image you see at Eugene O’Neill’s THE HAIRY APE at the Park Avenue Armory are rows and rows of seats, ready to absorb the arriving audience into a yellow, Borg-like mass. The implication...
Oct 31, 2016

Simon Starling: At Twilight

SIMON STARLING: AT TWILIGHT documents a revival, by Starling, a visual artist, and the theater maker Graham Eatough, of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well, the 1916 Irish folk play that drew on Noh dr...
Jul 23, 2016

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord‘s LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, now at the Lincoln Center Festival, matches high style with a ragamuffin disdain for it. Molière’s send-up of social snobbery under t...