161 stories by "James Wilson"
Last fall, Stephen Rea appeared in a celebrated revival of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which he portrayed a reclusive 69-year-old man grappling with decades of sadness and regret.…
Last season, New York's Mint Theater Company hit pay dirt with Garside's Career, a lesser-known work by Harold Brighouse, whose 1915 classic play Hobson's Choice is frequently staged and ada…
There is a priceless comic scene in Lauren Yee's Mother Russia, which opened last night at New York's Signature Theatre. It's 1992, just one year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a…
In 1999, Marcel Marceau said in an interview, "Of course, I have had many imitators. And I am aware of the jokes about mime. But if you love your art, you just do it. Time will judge me." In…
The first thing audiences will notice upon entering the Minetta Lane Theatre, where Erica Schmidt's The Disappear is running, is the rustic and exquisitely well-appointed living-room set. Sc…
A recent survey from Wolters Kluwer, a leading provider of healthcare data, reported that drug diversion is "the elephant in the hospital room." Individuals who have watched the first season…
"Can you explain simply please: what it is that makes a person a white person?" The question of who can claim whiteness is at the heart of Talene Monahon's thought-provoking new play, Meet t…
In 2005, when The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee opened Off-Broadway, the celestial bodies of the theatre world seemed to be in flawless alignment, and the production garnered rave r…
You'd never know that things are amiss in the tiny village of Concorde in Provence, France. The denizens cheerfully toss metal balls in games of pétanque, rehash old grudges, and enjoy leis…
Billy Collins's "Introduction to Poetry" describes an instructor's efforts to encourage students to engage with a poem both intuitively and emotionally. Instead, "All they want to do," the s…
Gloria Steinem famously stated, "We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach." As an academic who often leads courses in gender and sexuality s…
Missing the Ars Nova production of Oratorio for Living Things is one of my great theatre disappointments of the last several years. The production had performed only twice in 2019 before bei…
1937 was a very good year for new shows in the West End. In addition to the smash hit Me and My Girl, London also saw premieres of Ivor Novello's The Crest of the Wave, the frothy musical co…
At the top of Mexodus, the new, two-person musical produced by Audible Theater, audiences are given permission"indeed, are encouraged"to "yell, dance, and shake your asses." Typically, I cri…
Breaking, pioneered by African American and Puerto Rican youth, emerged in the Bronx in the early 1970s. Some fifty years later, the urban dance form is a worldwide phenomenon and was includ…
Welcome to the manosphere! The philosophy behind this realm is best summed up by 21 Studios, a prominent anti-feminist and Men's Rights Activist (MRA) organization, which succinctly instruct…
In his 2000 Pulitzer-Prize winning drama Dinner with Friends, Donald Margulies dissected the institution of marriage and revealed the quotidian struggles, shifting affinities, and existentia…
When I first saw Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice at Second Stage Theater in 2007, I found the play mawkish and pretentious. What's more, its retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seemed at the…
Swedish playwright August Strindberg's early plays explore fluctuating power dynamics, depicting relationships as volatile arenas where characters skillfully employ psychological manipulatio…
In his poem about the loneliness of a schoolteacher, playwright William Inge wrote, "Funny but being alone in a room full of people is more lonely somehow than/ Being left to your own device…
Emblazoned on a November 2006 cover of the New York Post was a photo of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears in the front seat of a fancy car. The trio, dubbed "3 Bimbos of the Ap…
Since it first appeared, Jason Robert Brown's song-cycle musical The Last Five Years seems to be in a continual loop. The short-lived Off-Broadway original in 2002 spawned countless regional…
When Tommy Marie, a character in Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness (now playing at Classic Stage Company's Lynn F. Angelson Theater), first appears, she draws laughs. Her ill-fitting …
Curse of the Starving Class, which was first produced in New York in 1978, is the second play in what playwright Sam Shepard called his Family Trilogy. Along with Buried Child and True West,…
Samuel D. Hunter's stunning and deeply affecting Grangeville, currently running at New York's Signature Center, begins in complete darkness. The disembodied phone voices of two men discussin…
