Playwrights Horizons

Off-Broadway Review: “Catch as Catch Can” at Playwrights Horizons (Closed Sunday, November 20, 2022)

Playwright Mia Chung intends to raise a rich and enduring question in her play “Catch as Catch Can” currently running at Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater: “What is inherent in our inheritance? What is universal?” Unfortunately, this question is not addressed nor answered in her character-driven play featuring Cindy Cheung, Jon Norman Schneider, and Rob Yang as Irish American…

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Off-Broadway Review: Tambo & Bones” at Playwrights Horizons (Closed Sunday, February 27, 2022)

In “Tambo & Bones,” currently running at Playwrights Horizons, playwright Dave Harris (“Summertime,” “Patricide”) gives the audience a minstrel show with three variety acts whose timeframes span more than two centuries. Endmen Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy) appear as humans in olios one and two performing for white audiences, and they appear as robots, themselves, and their…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater

Three Gen Y Conservative Christians gather at Justin’s (a thoughtful and broken Jeb Kraeger) backyard in Lander, Wyoming to celebrate Generation X Gina’s (a confident and willful Michelle Pawk) inauguration as president of Transfiguration College of Wyoming. These “heroes” are preparing for a battle of Armageddon-like proportions. They do not simply disagree with those infidels on the left: they despise…

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Off-Broadway Review: “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” in the Mainstage Theater at Playwrights Horizons

Once upon a time, in a not so very long time ago there was a beautiful young Nigerian woman named Akim (a self-absorbed yet fragile Níkẹ Uche Kadri) whose Ma (a stern but loving Maechi Aharanwa) and Dad (a somewhat subservient Jason Bowen) project their own flawed conception of what real beauty is (a thoroughly Eurocentric standard of beauty) upon…

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Off-Broadway Review: “I Was Most Alive with You” at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage

Present, past, and several possible futures collide with the biblical story of Job in Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive with You” currently playing at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage. And within each time frame and tale exist a multitude of layers of complexity and contingency about the human condition, particularly its vulnerability and resilience in the face of elucidated and unexplained…

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Off-Broadway Review: Clare Barron’s “Dance Nation” Explores the Angst of Adolescence with Cathartic Wit at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Clare Barron’s “Dance Nation” Explores the Angst of Adolescence with Cathartic Wit. Separation-individuation is one of life’s most difficult passages: it is completed successfully by most; however, more than might be suspected remain in the mire of adolescence all their lives. Prepubescence is supposed to erupt in adulthood – adults emerging where clingy parent-dependent pre-teens once held sway. It is…

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Off Broadway Review: “The Treasurer” at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater

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…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Play Like A Winner” at the New York Musical Festival at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater

The new musical “Play Like a Winner” is based on the stage play “It’s All About the Kids” by Caytha Jentis which comically explores the dark side of competitive soccer moms vying for social status in upscale suburbia. The opening musical number “Sacrifice” is sung by the company surrounding the body of the coach lying dead, center stage impaled with…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Numbers Nerds” at the New York Musical Festival at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater

One of the welcomed distinctions about the new musical “Number Nerds” is that its creation was prompted in response to the need for more female roles available for the high school, college, and community theater circuit. In that respect, it successfully targets that audience with lighthearted comedy, energetic music and a book that promotes good moral values. It is a…

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Off-Broadway Review: “The Light Years” at Playwrights Horizons

“You are not simply an electrician, you are illuminating the world!” claims one of the six characters in “The Light Years,” a pleasant, but less than fulfilling concoction now playing at Playwrights Horizons. Produced by a company called the Debate Society – which recreates slices of Americana – it focuses on two Chicago world fairs, exactly forty years apart. It…

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