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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 lifetime. Yet it prefigures the themes and characters of the later plays, a poetic amalgam of fumbled suicides, frustrated loves, threatened estates,…
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Cloud 9
The pleasures of CLOUD 9 are theatrically intense and exhilarating to think about. The Atlantic Theater Company realizes the Caryl Churchill drama with a Shakespearean flair, in the round, its cast as skilled as they come, immersed in the mimetic arts, each playing at least two parts, identities dropped and put on again, like masks…
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An Octoroon
As dramaturgy alone, AN OCTOROON is exhilarating, but its pleasures – for such they are – run deeper. The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the director Sarah Benson have restored, recast, retooled, and revived Dion Boucicault‘s THE OCTOROON with a mimetic deftness that reifies and exposes the racialist assumptions and stereotypes that animate, indeed dramatize, the…