“Well — in any case, the play hadn’t been terribly well-liked by the public, and it wasn’t a success, but quite a few people had enjoyed it quite a bit, including, interestingly, a certain Mr. Ackerley, who not long afterwards began to take a more and more prominent place in our national life, which, I’d have to admit, was not…
“Dying is no big deal; the least of us can manage that. The trick is how you live, and Mr. Bill Kunstler lived. He lived with a searing pace, a furious energy, and overwhelming love of right and dislike of wrong.” – Jimmy Breslin in “The New York Times” Attorney William Kunstler was an important figure in American jurisprudence. “Kunstler,”…
“I think so. I think he’s a good God, who can make bad plans. Thing’s going OK over at the shop?” – Joseph (Dad) to Luke Unable to score a substantial victory with his parents, his girlfriend Suze (played with a doleful and deep sadness by Laura Darrell), or his conservative Baptist faith community, seventeen-year-old Luke (Brandon Flynn) – as…
“The Dressmaker’s Secret” by Sarah Levine Simon and Mihal Grunfeld is enjoying its world premiere at 59E59 Theaters. The new play is based on Mr. Grunfeld’s novel “The Dressmaker’s Son” and the change from ‘son’ to ‘secret’ is more significant than might be obvious at first glance. Why did the playwrights shift the focus from the son to the mother’s…
“Sometimes I think you’re delusional about having all this power. Other times I think you’ve far too much of it.” – Miranda to Sir Alan Hruska’s new play “Ring Twice for Miranda,” currently playing at New York City Center Stage II, is starkly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” and revisits the important existential themes of choices and their consequences,…
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…
Legend has it that on May Eve all sorts of sorcery abounds in the country sides of Ireland. That is certainly the case on Crackskull Road somewhere in Dublin 2 on the April 30 in question in Honor Molloy’s delightful psychological thriller “Crackskull Road” currently playing at Irish Rep Theatre. For eighty riveting minutes, the complex Morrigan family system splays…
“Do you have what you need? Do you need what you have?” – Geoff Sobelle The audience enters the New York Theatre Workshop into a vast display of “stuff” up for viewing, exploring, opening, sharing, moving around, and engaging with. And there is plenty to explore: lamps of all sizes and shapes; small boats filled with boxes suspended from the…
For a brief time in Tanya Saracho’s “Fade,” currently playing at Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the lines between class and status fade as Mexican-born script writer Lucia (Annie Dow) and American-born Chicano custodian Abel (Eddie Martinez) seem to drop their guards and allow their “similarities” to overshadow their “differences.” Abel “forgives” Lucia for her assumptions when he…
“An Orange Julius. That’s what I want.” – Julius Basil Kreimendahl’s “Orange Julius” is a memory play. Narrated by Nut (Jess Barbagallo), the play defies space and time to tell the complex story of the narrator’s relationship with their estranged father Julius (Stephen Payne) a Vietnam War Veteran dying from cancer caused by exposure on the battlefield to the herbicide…