“After great pain, a formal feeling comes -/The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-/The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before?” (Emily Dickinson, #341) Educators and academics have been trying to determine why schools fail for decades and have yet to identify successfully a formula for preventing the pandemic failure of education – particularly in…
Primary Stages (Casey Childs, Founder & Executive Producer; Andrew Leynse, Artistic Director) announced their upcoming 32nd Season on March 14 at a champagne reception celebrating the Centennial of the birth of late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Primary Stages collaborator, Horton Foote. The 2016/17 season, to be performed at New York’s historic Cherry Lane Theatre (38 Commerce Street, www.cherrylanetheatre.org), will feature…
Dan O’Brien’s “The Body of an American,” currently running at Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre, is oddly reminiscent of Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.” Discussions between the play’s characters – the main characters Dan (Michael Crane) and Paul (Michael Cumpsty) – and secondary characters (also played by…
“A comprehensive movement toward informed consent began after World War II with the 1947 Nuremberg trials. In these war trials, it was revealed that physicians conducted abhorrent medical research experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The research included human experimentation with germ warfare, freezing individuals to learn what temperature kills individuals most effectively, and many more horrifying research trials.” (Encyclopedia of…
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Attributed to Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud’s iconic phrase might be an apt descriptor for David Ives’ “Lives of the Saints” currently running at Primary Stages at the Duke on 42nd Street. When Mr. Ives tackles the vicissitudes of the human condition (tackles the lives of the saints) as he does in the satisfying…
“Give me my flowers/While I yet live/So that I, I, can see the beauty/That they bring.” – James Cleveland In 1994, just before the Thanksgiving turkey is carved and served, Calvin (Larry Powell) packs his things, says good-bye to Eva (Sharon Washington) and his sister Tonya (Sheria Irving) and leaves his Pittsburgh house and home. Sexually abused by his stepfather…
Theresa Rebeck asks an important and rich question in her new “Poor Behavior” currently running at the Duke on 42nd Street the new home of Primary Stages. This question might go unnoticed it is so intertwined with Ms. Rebeck’s rant about the state of marriage in contemporary “civilized” culture: and it is a good rant indeed. The real question though…
Charles Busch and his band of merry-makers have pitched camp (for all too short a time) at 59E59 Theater A for the final offering in Primary Stages’ twenty-ninth Season, Mr. Busch’s gender-bending and exquisite “The Tribute Artist.” The result of this incursion into the winter blues is nothing short of brilliant. From cast to creative team to direction, this delicious…
One cannot pay off the past. Unless it is confronted and dealt with, it just keeps impacting the present and future. Although Donald Margulies’ “The Model Apartment” seems to deal solely with the detritus of Holocaust fallout, the play is about far more and warrants the current Primary Stages revival of this 1995 OBIE Award winning play at 59E59 Theaters….
“The ghosts of baseball past serve up a feast for the soul in Eric Simonson’s BRONX BOMBERS!” Reggie Jackson (Francois Battiste) in Eric Simonson’s “Bronx Bombers” is spot on: much of his bombastic rhetoric in the meeting in a hotel room in the Boston Sheraton in 1977 with Yogi Berra, Thuman Munson, and Billy Martin is “a metaphor.” Indeed, Mr….