You will get sick. It happens. You do not know why. Often you do not want to tell anyone you are sick. Perhaps you might even pay someone to talk to you about your illness. Yet after all that, you still might die. And you are not alone. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote about “When Bad Things Happen to Good…
As Stacey Derosier’s lighting comes up on the stage of Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which is currently being co-presented by Vineyard Theatre and Women’s Project Theater at the Vineyard, Angela (a willful yet vulnerable Brittany Bellizeare) and Odessa (a confident and temperamental Marinda Anderson) slowly emerge from behind beach umbrellas (“where the sand is”). Both complain about the omnipresence of sand…
Manhattan Theatre Club’s New York premiere of The Cake, written by Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us,” “American Gods,” The Oregon Trail) and directed by MTC’s award-winning Artistic Director Lynne Meadow (The Assembled Parties, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, The Commons of Pensacola), opens tomorrow at MTC at New York City Center – Stage I (131 West 55th Street). The…
Playwright Mike Lew characterizes his play “Teenage Dick” as “vaguely from Richard III.” The protagonist of this engaging and quite dark play is high school junior Richard Gloucester (Gregg Mozgala). Richard has CP and likes to speak with a Shakespearean flair and verbiage. His disability and diction have made him the object of verbal and physical harassment. This Roseland High…
After seeing her estranged daughter’s “veiled suicide threat” on her “anonymous” blog, Beatriz (the irrepressible Daphne Rubin-Vega) drives her truck “like a bat out of hell” from California to Philadelphia to take her daughter Olivia (the deeply reflective Gizel Jiménez) on a seven-day road trip. After some mild mid-adolescent protestations, Olivia – sixteen – agrees to the trip hoping, perhaps,…
Max Posner’s “The Treasurer,” currently running at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, is a play about Ida Armstrong’s (played with a fragile irascibility by Deanna Dunagan) youngest son (played with an equally fragile ego strength by Peter Friedman) whose siblings have placed him in charge of their mother’s bank account, her spending, her assets and her liabilities. This role of…