A decade back, Jordan Harrison got us thinking about artificial intelligence, man-machine relationships, and the dangers of rapidly advancing technologies in his Pulitzer finalist Marjorie P…
The house at Irish Repertory Theatre is less than full, and the end-of-evening applause, at best, polite. There's my argument: Do less Samuel Beckett! But Irish Rep is on something of a Beck…
"Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side la…
There's more than a whiff of Rent to We Live in Cairo, Daniel and Patrick Lazour's long-aborning musical now at New York Theatre Workshop. Also the heady scents of cardamom and sumac. Take a…
One of the pleasures of Vladimir, Erika Sheffer's sturdy new play at Manhattan Theatre Club, is how it allows us Americans to listen in on ordinary Russians' conversations. We've had plenty …
This won't be a long one, because The Counter is one of those plays where divulging almost any detail might constitute a spoiler. Meghan Kennedy's short, straightforward exploration of frien…
Your first thought on entering the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons is, hey, this doesn't look like the set for a song cycle. That's what Magnificent Bird and Book of Traveler…
"Fatherland." Has a vaguely Teutonic ring to it, no? But plays don't come more American than Fatherland, Stephen Sachs's distillation of disturbing recent U.S. events and their cataclysmic e…
It's Irish Rep, and there's a squabbling mother and her adult son onstage, so we know this isn't going to end well. My first thought of The Beacon, Nancy Harris's new play, was, this reminds…
So let me take you back to the original Forbidden Broadway. It's 1982 and we're at Palsson's, an inelegant upstairs boîte on West 72nd Street (it's still there, as the Triad). The stage i…
As one who has often found the works of Samuel Beckett to be baffling, boring, or both, I wasn't looking forward to On Beckett. The lecture on and excerpts from the man's oeuvre, returning t…
Everybody, except me, loved Irish Repertory Theatre's previous effort in its Friel Project, Philadelphia, Here I Come! They saw a trenchant examination of stultifying small-town Irish life a…
Here There Are Blueberries is surely the right title for this one. It refers to a caption in a photo album, a very special photo album. The phrase evokes a carefree, whimsical quotidian exis…
Ever seen a shaggy-dog play? That's a fair description of Staff Meal, Abe Koogler's shape-shifter of a comedy now at Playwrights Horizons. His purpose is hard to pin down, if not impossible.…
With Brooklyn Laundry having recently ended its merry run at Manhattan Theatre Club, New York now has a new, not-dissimilar mini-romance to celebrate. Lia Romeo's Still, from Colt Coeur at D…
Philadelphia, Here I Come! was Brian Friel's first major success, and the new revival at Irish Repertory Theatre, part of its Friel Project retrospective, offers ample evidence why. It's a s…
You've probably heard about it as "the musical about the penis-eating vagina." Yes, but Teeth aims to be something more"a horror musical that also takes in repression, misogyny, violence, an…
Rupert Murdoch is a scourge, a reckless power monger whose pursuit of material gain has irrevocably changed and devalued the journalistic universe. On that much many of us will probably agre…
The New York Times beat me to it yesterday in saying so, but gosh, this is some season John Patrick Shanley is having. First a well-received revival of his early play, Danny and the Deep Blu…
It's called A Sign of the Times, and zowie, is it ever. Start with a jukebox score, consisting of rock 'n' roll favorites old enough to be nostalgically remembered by people old enough to be…
At the Brick, there's not a bad seat in the house. That's because the house is a long, narrow room framing a long, narrow table, plus a few barstool-height chairs against the wall to fill th…
Storytelling doesn't come much more basic than I Love You So Much I Could Die, Mona Pirnot's autobiographical one-woman show at New York Theatre Workshop. NYTW's mainstage theater usually fe…
The first thing about Jonah: It's not much about Jonah. He's a character, to be sure, an endearing one, embodied by Hagan Oliveras with goofy Jesse Eisenberg charm. But Jonah is mostly about…
Said my companion as we exited Aristocrats: "It's The Cherry Orchard meets Three Sisters." Not quite, but Brian Friel's 1979 drama, in revival at Irish Repertory Theatre, does have a heavy l…
The Jerusalem Syndrome? The timing does not seem propitious for the York Theatre Company to trot out what's meant to be a fizzy, escapist musical comedy set in the present-day Middle East. B…