September 20, 2019

Drama, Reviews

Edward Karam

Keith Hamilton Cobb has written a thrilling part for himself in American Moor, a powerful look at Shakespeare, Othello, and the plight of black actors trying to pursue their craft with honesty. Cobb himself stars, although his character in the script is called the Actor. The play arrives at a moment when race and white privilege dominate the zeitgeist. Some of the material is familiar, but much is unique and insightful.

September 20, 2019

Drama, Reviews

Stanford Friedman

Fern Hill

A bum hip and a broken marriage drive the chatter in Michael Tucker’s disjointed therapy session of a play, Fern Hill. Making its New York premiere at the 59E59 Theaters, following a 2018 run at the New Jersey Rep, the production boasts a cast full of familiar faces, including Tucker’s wife and former L.A. Law co-star, Jill Eikenberry, in the central roll of Sunny, a gloomy woman who must decide if she is capable of tolerating a cheating spouse. Indeed, tolerance is this drama’s leitmotif as Sunny and her hubby are joined by two other couples, at their upstate New York farmhouse, to decide just how much of one another, and of themselves, they can take.

September 17, 2019

Reviews, Comedy

Colin Macdonald

Wives

Jaclyn Backhaus’s Wives, at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Margot Bordelon, is a raucous, funny, well-acted, and well-intentioned production that suffers from intermittent heavy-handedness and whose four distinct parts don’t fully cohere. The final of the four vignettes that comprise the 80-minute play tries to wrangle the previous three stories, which originated as ideas for three separate plays, into a harmonious symmetry, but it only muddies the waters so that Wives ends up feeling like partially thought-out ideas awaiting fuller exploration.

September 17, 2019

Immersive/Interactive, Drama, Reviews

Edward Karam

Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe?

The title question of Poseidon Theatre Company’s immersive/interactive production Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe? The Cooping Theory 1969 is probably not one most people have asked themselves, even if they were aware that the great author had died mysteriously in 1849. Even less likely to be known is the second phrase in the title: “the cooping theory.”

September 13, 2019

Drama, Reviews

Stanford Friedman

Only Yesterday

The motel room drama is a genre all its own. Its structure generally involves a short stay in a strange, tight space where two or more friends, spouses or lovers have it out with one another, while anything from bad weather to existential threats keep them from fleeing. Examples range from Sam Shepard’s dynamic Fool for Love to A.R. Gurney’s contemplative The Wayside Motor Inn. In his 2018 one-act, Only Yesterday, television writer and first-time playwright Bob Stevens adds a couple of new elements to the form. His work is inspired by actual events, and the characters happen to be two of the most famous men in the world: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Thus confined by reality and familiarity, the results are nostalgic, if not exactly explosive.

Jason O'Connell

Edward Karam

April 13, 2018

Comedy, Reviews, Drama

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Edward Karam

April 13, 2018

Comedy, Reviews, Drama

The reputation of Kurt Vonnegut nowadays rest on his comic novels—a mainstay of 1960s counterculture. He combined flights of hilarious whimsy with science fiction and sharp satire in works such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). But at the height of his powers, Vonnegut also wrote a Broadway play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June. The play may not be a masterpiece, but the production by the Wheelhouse Theater Company under director Jeff Wise breathes screwball life into it with strong performances and unabashed theatricality.

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Charles Wright

November 27, 2017

Comedy, Reviews

Pride and Prejudice

Charles Wright

November 27, 2017

Comedy, Reviews

Don’t underestimate Jane Austen. Her authorial voice, distinctively witty and humane, rings out above the Gothic din of early 19th-century fiction. Two centuries after her death, this middle-class provincial’s novels still enchant readers with their verisimilitude and authenticity, despite how radically manners and morals have changed.