buried child
In “Florida Man” by Michael Presley Bobbitt, a young man racked with guilt digs up his dead father William Crud (the crud of a memory John Higgins) to give him the proper Viking funeral he always wanted. Billy Crud (a hapless and somewhat damaged Michael Ford) regrets not having granted his father’s last wishes about his “resting place.” Despite Billy’s…
In the 18th and 19th centuries, new phrases entered the language of the sailors who took to the sea off the island of Nantucket, one of the whaling capitals of the world during that period. One specific expression “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” describes what happens when a harpooned whale drags the sailors in their long boat across the surface of the…
In Part One of Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane,” currently playing at the New York Theatre Workshop, Mary Jane (Carrie Coon) is at home caring for her two-and-a-half-year-old son Alex. She shares that responsibility with several professional caregivers, including Sherry (played with compassionate expediency by Liza Colón-Zayas) and Donna, the incompetent nurse the audience never sees. Alex, born at twenty-five weeks…
More “Of Mice and Men” than “Orphans,” “Yen,” currently playing at MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, dives headlong into the miasma of dysfunctional families without abandon and lands in a matrix of enduring questions that British playwright Anna Jordan decides not to answer in this play that makes its way from a successful run at the Royal Exchange…
“Yeah, it’s always summer somewhere.” – Smelly, Act II, “Camp Rolling Hills” The sixth musical number in “Camp Rolling Hills” is “A Reason to Smile” in which Slimey (camper Stephanie Gregson’s nickname) tries to convince new camper Smelly (camper Robert Benjamin’s nickname) that although “divorce isn’t easy soon you’ll see it’s not so bad.” This advice comes from a girl…
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.” ― Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”…