An overturned chair on an otherwise bare carpeted stage “speaks” volumes about the current status of the Seaview Hotel in Helensburgh Scotland. Upright that same chair and the audience is transported back in time to a flashback of epic proportions. Move the chair about the stage during the flashback and the scenes change disclosing a tryst between two persons, two…
It is difficult to identify the real antagonist in Penny Jackson’s new play “I Know What Boys Want” running at the WorkShop Theater through April 13. The conflicts are as numerous and entangled as the over-the-top tangle of cell phones dangling from the “ceiling” of the set. The main conflict which drives the predominant plot is between Vicky Walker (Sara…
Point of view percolates a delicious brew of intrigue in Anna Khaja’s “Shaheed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto” playing at Culture Project at 45 Bleecker Street. Through the points of view of eight characters, Khaja’s engaging play focuses on the life and death of Benazir Bhutto and this literary device allows the audience member to have access to…
Surrealism collides with abstract expressionism in Eddie Elks “Botallack O’Clock” currently running at 59E59 Theater C as part of the “Brits Off-Broadway” Festival. Mr. Elks’ dramatic canvas reinvents and reimagines the brush strokes of Roger Hilton’s richly complex life and the result is performance art at its best. Eddie Elks’ palette includes paint pots full of real interviews with Hilton…
An important piece of theater aptly entitled “Hit the Wall” is consuming the small stage at The Barrow Street Theater in New York City’s West Village. Ike Holter’s new play examines the incidents which occurred at the birth of the gay movement at the nearby Stonewall Inn where riots erupted on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral on June 26th…
“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…