The Revelation of the Undertow of Wonder “I can’t help but wish and feel as if there’s more to our lives, somewhere, in this moment. Than this concern for the whereabouts and well-adjustment of a devil. I’m bored to exhaustion. Devil, devil. Devil. Bringer of evil. Filler of vacuums, blah blah blah.” Dora In a recent New York Times interview…
“Realising your gay is such a strange thing. I know it’s different for everyone but for everyone there is that moment when you must “Come Out” to yourself! This can happen years before you have the courage to come out to anybody else. But it is no less stressful.” The only language unbecoming a lady like Diva Diana – or…
“There is no play and you know it.” – Michael to Anna ‘Clever’ morphs to ‘profound’ as film noire narration counterpoints with spoken word and played scenes, in Michael Laurence’s “Hamlet in Bed” a play within a play within a play. Playwright Michael Laurence constructs a fascinating and engaging retelling of the “Queen’s closet scene” in “Hamlet” (Act III, Scene…
With only one glitch (more about that later in the review), Matthew Lopez’s “The Legend of Georgia McBride” is a high-energy, high-octane song and dance extravaganza that plays with exotic and explosive exuberance and verve on the stage of the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Manhattan’s West Village. It is a heartwarming story of courage and acceptance and it is about…
“Miss Madeleine, be free, courageous, be beautiful and be the best swan in the pond. And Johnno Boyle O’Connor will be entirely yours.” (The swan on the pond to Madeline) If the world we are born into and expected to flourish in fails us, we sometimes need an alternate place to inhabit where we can find nurture and acceptance, and…
“No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.” (John Waters, “The Kindness of a Stranger,” New York Times, November 19, 2006) 59E59 Theater’s critically acclaimed 5A Series begins the 2015-2015 Season with…
Playwright Pat Fenton’s “Stoopdreamer” – part of the 1st Irish 2015 Festival – holds special meaning to the Irish American community of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn and it holds an equally special meaning to all residents of urban communities who have experienced the process of gentrification over the past quarter century (or more) – gentrification by outsiders and by urban planning…
Life throws a lot at its participants during their time from birth to death. Some of the experience is pleasant, some of it unpleasant, some of it tolerable, and some of it intolerable. And some of what humankind “suffers” is just odd. One can either choose to take what comes lightly and laugh it up, or be more proactive and…
“I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,/I saw a white ladder all covered with water,/I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,/I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children, And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”…
The life and times of the notorious Roy Cohn have been chronicled in fiction and non-fiction and perhaps most notable in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” where Ethel Rosenberg “appears” at Cohn’s deathbed in a series of over-the-top conversations about her trial and execution. In a 2006 article in “The New York Times,” Adam Liptak wrote, “Mr. Kushner said he…