When Giovanni (David Proval) tells his attorney Sanford Weiss (David Deblinger), “I shouldn’t be here,” only he knows why that is true and the audience will not know until minutes before the end of Michael Ricigliano, Jr.’s beguiling thriller “A Queen for a Day” currently running at the Theatre at St. Clement’s in New York City. Mr. Ricigliano’s script is…
The world is going to hell in a handbasket and Howard Shirley (Oliver Devoti) knows that perhaps better than anyone. Not only does he have a photographic memory, but he is clairvoyant so Howard – if anyone would – knows the center is not holding and it might be time for him and his wife to check out. In an…
“No more my Lord/No more my Lord/Lord, I’ll never turn back/No more my Lord” (Traditional American Spiritual, Composed for Choir by R. Nathaniel Dett) What matters about “Cool Hand Luke” is the corpus of enduring questions Donn Pearce’s rich text raises and what matters about Emma Reeves’ stage adaptation of the 1965 novel is whether or not those enduring questions…
“Tuesdays that’s that. I spend the day there doing this and that dusting and all sorts. I shake out the tablecloth. I change the sheets. I empty the bin.” Pauline in “Tuesdays at Tesco’s” The only thing that interrupts the samsara of Pauline’s (Simon Callow) hum-drum life is the string of dream ballets that spontaneously burst forth from the piano…
If you buy into the old adage ‘good writers steal,’ then Qui Nguyen is the best playwright in town. His post-apocalyptic epic ‘Six Rounds of Vengeance’ presented by the ever-infamous Vampire Cowboys is a flashy potpourri of Tarantino-esque homage. One could practically make a bingo game from the sheer volume of references to Mad Max, Blade, Fallout: New Vegas, Hack/Slash,…
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” Richard Wright, “Black Boy” (1945) With rhythms more reminiscent of song than spoken word, Dael…
In the words of Theatre Critic Charles Spencer, “there are moments in my line of work when criticism seems impertinent.” The Culture Project’s Nirbhaya seems such an occasion. The show consists of six Indian women recounting their personal stories of sexual abuse in response to the 2012 gang-rape murder of the medical student in Delhi. (Nicknamed ‘Nirbhaya’ or ‘Fearless One’…
How do we remember The Holocaust in 2015? Writer/performer Jane Elias grapples with this behemoth question in her profoundly moving, exquisitely personal solo show ‘Do This One Thing For Me’ currently running at Barrow Group. The play chronicles Jane’s relationship with her late father, a Greek-Jewish Holocaust survivor. His own family having been brutally murdered in concentration camps, all Mr….
It’s Doubt meets Lolita in Nate Rufus Edleman’s pontifical comedy The Belle of Belfast, currently at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Anne, a seventeen-year-old girl living in Belfast during the violent Troubles, falls in love with Ben, a dashing young(ish) priest. Initially he resists, but when Anne shows up at his parish soaked through from the rain and teary over her…
Exiles from Europe’s last true dictatorship, the Belarus Free Theatre delivers a knockout punch with its monumental “Trash Cuisine”, now onstage at La MaMa. An amorphous dedication to capital punishment under the guise of an international cooking program, the show gruesomely highlights socially sanctioned killing from around the globe. Leather straps, machetes, and bulk food items are brought ominously to…