In her program notes for “You Got Older,” playwright Clare Barron shares her “optimistic belief that there is profound comfort in just living privately together. Life and desire can persist even if all we can muster up is the courage and time to sit together with something unspeakable between us.” It’s a beautiful articulation of what this 2014 play—now receiving…
Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” currently at the Public Theater’s Barbaralee Theater, is not the Sophocles tragedy I taught in high school—but then again, neither is James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” the Hamlet Shakespeare wrote. The difference is that Ijames trusts his reimagining enough to tell his story without constantly stopping to explain it….
Abigail and Shaun Bengson welcome the audience to New York Theatre Workshop for “My Joy is Heavy.” They introduce themselves, the band, the crew. They explain this is a relaxed house performance—you can do whatever is good for your body and nervous system, there are access tables in the back, and if you have to get up and pee, they…
“Did You Write This Scene or Did I?” THE UNKNOWN at Studio Seaview When critics dismissed David Cale’s “The Unknown” as a solo thriller with a “tired twist,” they revealed more about their own jadedness than about the play’s achievement. At Studio Seaview, in a production directed by Leigh Silverman, Sean Hayes delivers a performance of such psychological precision and…
A Theatrical Rorschach Test: CHINESE REPUBLICANS at Roundabout Alex Lin’s “Chinese Republicans” arrives at Roundabout Theatre Company with considerable ambition: a world premiere examining Asian-American identity through the lens of corporate culture, intergenerational trauma, sexual harassment, immigration policy, economic justice, and political ideology. Director Chay Yew stages the action primarily at Golden Unicorn, a Chinatown dim sum restaurant where four…
“We’re Here. Right Now: THE RESERVOIR’s Hard-Won Grace” Jake Brasch’s “The Reservoir,” now playing at Atlantic Theater Company, operates through counterpoint: addiction and dementia, comedy and grief, the impulse to fix and the necessity of letting go. Josh (Noah Galvin), a 20-something alcoholic fresh from a Florida rehab disaster, returns to Denver convinced he can save his four aging grandparents…
“Parsing Joyce: ERS’s ULYSSES Demonstrates Without Embodying” Good readers create images as they navigate dense text, constructing a personal vision of the world on the page. Elevator Repair Service’s production of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” currently playing at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall, offers the company’s own kaleidoscopic image of Joyce’s epic novel—a playful, fragmented encounter with one of modernism’s most…
Don’t Look at Me: “The Other Place” and the Tragedy Critics Missed When Alexander Zeldin’s “The Other Place” premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2024, critics hailed it as “the outstanding play of the year” and praised its “taut, riveting naturalism.” That same production, now transferred to The Shed with most of its original cast, has met a decidedly cooler…
Calling all playwrights! We are excited to announce an open call for submissions for the 2026 Broadway Bound Theatre Festival . Showcase your new play in the heart of NYC Get support from page to stage with our expert team Don’t miss out as we celebrate 10 years of premiering new plays and new musicals from emerging and established playwrights. We…
Twenty-nine years after its London premiere, Tracy Letts’ “Bug” has finally crawled onto Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, and the question that matters most isn’t whether this David Cromer-directed production succeeds or fails—it’s whether Cromer understood what play he was directing. “Bug” is a psychiatric horror about folie à deux, the clinical term for shared psychotic…