“Unless you are honest with yourself, you cannot be honest with the people who love you.” Sigmund Freud would have loved “Honky,” Greg Kalleres’s new play running at Urban Stages through April 14th. This play is chock full of repression, transference, hysteria, projection, and it makes people laugh. Freud loved humor and posited in his 1905 “Jokes and Their Relation…
Men (the male of the species, not the generic ‘humankind’) are often (always?) quite a burden to carry when they are among the living. Post mortem, these same men are often (in perpetuity?) even more of a burden to carry – for the living who remember them and for the dead who must share either Paradisio or Inferno with them….
“Homey: The boys, the ones you not only like, but trust. Term of endearment towards another signifying closeness. Examples: You homeys got my back, right? Hey, you will always be my homey.” (Urban Dictionary) Star-crossed homeys Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller) transfer their struggling marriage of five years from the United States to Belleville, a colorful multi-ethnic neighborhood…
When people want to express the total pointlessness of something, they sometimes say that thing is as silly as “arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.” The familiar phrase is also a rather cynical description of what might be considered a tedious concern with irrelevant details. For Caliban (a civilian version of Taliban perhaps),…
“So high you can’t get over it /So low you can’t get under it /So wide you can’t get ’round it /You gotta’ go in at the door.” – Traditional American Gospel Song In The New Group’s spellbinding production “Clive” at the Acorn Theatre, Clive the protagonist does all he can to avoid redemption (going in at the door), including…
“Children of Paradise,” Richmond Shepard’s new play being performed at the Theater for the New City, is a combination of several mime pieces seen in the film version of the same name and the life story of Baptiste Gaspard Debureau the famous pantomime who performed in France during the 19th century. The spoken dialogue in the script provides information about…
As the twenty-first century moves forward, events national and global have not only raised mortgage rates, the rate of unemployment, the amount of the national debt, and the level of bickering in the United States Congress but also has raised the level of national, global, and personal rage. That level of rage is apparent in the experience of many in…
In his seventeenth-century poem “On Time,” John Milton envisions humankind’s triumph over “envious Time.” Milton writes, “When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall clime, / Then all this Earthy grosnes quit, / Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit, / Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.” Time (and all its vicissitudes) is the subject of “All in…
Everyone in Paul Bomba’s “The Man Under,” currently running at 59E59 Theater C, is either in need of being saved (Jeff) or needs to be a savior (Martin), is skilled at being a confessor (Martin again) or is a practiced penitent (Jennifer), is either into holding hands and cuddling (Jeff) or into asphyxiophilia (Lisa). Any or all of these character…
In the online poetry dictionary “Toto Poetry,” one posted rondelet defines ‘collision’ in this way: “Cause motions, /assume the ready position. /Cause emotions, parasitic oscillations. /To go into operation, /strike with disgust or revulsion. /Cause emotions.” In the Amoralists Theatre Company’s World Premiere of “Collision” currently running at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Grange collides with his new roommate Bromley, Professor Denton…