The sharp poignancy of Ibsen's classic comes through strongly in a flawed but sincere new production by the young company The Instigators. The tragic story of an unhappy young wife whose hopes of a glorious future of social ascendancy are being dashed before her eyes rings as true today as it did when Ibsen wrote it 125 years ago.
Read More »Tag Archives: off-off-Broadway
EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Director Courtney Laine Self on Presenting Mae West’s 1927 Broadway Hit ‘SEX’
Mae West wrote 'SEX' in the mid-1920s, just after the peak of first-wave feminism hit with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. First-wave feminism was about suffrage and other basic political inequalities. 'SEX' more directly challenges gender roles and expectations and illustrates the hypocrisy and tragic consequences of societal gender inequities. So, West was more in line with second-wave feminism – which didn’t happen until the 1960s!
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at the Secret Theatre
Alberto Bonilla's powerful staging set in postwar Italy does just about everything right.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): Motherlode Theatre Company’s ‘The Good Earth’
Welsh villagers are pressured to leave their ancestral homes when the government suspects their mountain may collapse.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): ‘Iphigenia Among the Taurians’ Adapted from Euripides
The text of this well-staged new adaptation strikes a smile-inducing, attention-grabbing, and surprisingly believable balance between literary authenticity – this is indeed Euripides' play in all its essentials – and contemporary informality and even snark.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): ‘Line’ by Israel Horovitz
At moments, the refreshed production of NYC's longest-running play reminded me of looking at those books of old New Yorker cartoons from the 1950s and '60s, with their wordless multi-panel stories and their hapless Organization Men. But for most of its length, I wished I'd gotten on line for something else.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): ‘Strange Country’ by Anne Adams
New Light Theater Project's new production gives us an uncommon triple portrait of common anguish, straight from the strange country of the human condition.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): ‘A Man Like You’ by Silvia Cassini
This intense new play hurls us into a deadly thicket of politics and diplomacy, international business intrigue, the clash of cultures, and jihad through the fictional story of a British hostage in Somalia.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): ‘Helvectica’ by Will Coleman
Lovely writing and solid acting make Will Coleman's literate, thoughtful one-act shine, but an unorthodox structure prevents it from achieving a dramatic arc.
Read More »Theater Review (NYC): A New Twist on Zombie Apocalypse in ‘Rizing’ by Jason Tseng
Flux Theatre Ensemble executes Tseng's brash post-zombie-apocalypse premise with equal parts psychological grace and horror-story panache.
Read More »