Art is unjust. Its first rule is that there are no rules, and its second is that, if you don't have some to follow while you're creating it, a royal mess will probably result. This week, two new editions of old musicals are cases in point. One sets ...
It can't be a coincidence that "one-upmanship" has that "man" right in the middle of it, can it? Guys' hopeless need to trump each other powers the bravura (bro-vura?) comedy of Bill Irwin and David Shiner's Old Hats, a vaudevillian lark that's all ...
Everybody loves Falstaff. The rotund knight--his appetite for life as large as his corpulent body, his respect for truth and conventional morality as small as his desire to pay his bar tab--is one of Shakespeare's best-beloved creations. He's so viv...
To glimpse Donyale Werle's set for Rajiv Joseph's The North Pool at the Vineyard is to return to the futility, pettiness, and misery of high school. (And I actually liked my high school.) Joseph locates this contrived two-hander in the office of Vic...
She clambers up through a trap door, emerging onstage with a collection of tatty faceless dummies in tow. They're swathed in duct tape, and names are stenciled on their chests: One is John (her first husband), another Bobby (his brother), and a third...
We get ourselves through the monotony of daily life however we can. The stories told about high-school football are filled with bigger hits. The memory of our first kiss tastes a bit sweeter. We lie to ourselves simply because it's often just easier ...
"Authors are just notoriously difficult," says the publicity director in Jessica Francis Kane's story "How to Become a Publicist" from her 2002 collection Bending Heaven. While this might be true of some writers, we can't imagine anyone saying it of ...
In the opening scene of Lucy Loves Me, at INTAR Theatre, Milton (Gerardo Rodriguez, deliciously perverse) a bachelor in a robe, wrings a bleeding chicken into the bathtub. Then, stripping to a thong, Milton spread-eagles over the tub and mimes inter...
The recent New Museum exhibition "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" has launched a wave of multi-culti, identity-politics nostalgia that deserves a bracing antidote. That antidote exists, thank God, in a fantastic uptown painting ex...
"I could hate the lovable Irish," sings the hero of the 1961 Broadway musical Donnybrook! (Irish Rep), "but I'm Irish myself." We all know that strange mixture of pride, irritation, and affectionate contempt for our own ethnic group, nation, religio...
Chief among the dark oddities of life in 18th- and 19th-century London is that the city, which produced so many dead, was itself forever in want of corpses. Grave robbers found stocking the labs of scientists and students such profitable work that ...
Fathers disappear. Telephone men fall in love with long distance, traveling salesmen never come home from the road. But our culture quails at the idea that a mother would do such things. When was the last time you saw a poster dunning "Deadbeat Moms...
Oh, the litany of wedding-day traditions--the bouquet, the garter, the rings, the borrowed, the blue. But here's a custom not often practiced: chopping off your beloved's hands. The Cornish company Kneehigh returns to St. Ann's Warehouse with The Wi...
"Am I a terrible person?" David (Jesse Eisenberg) asks his Polish cousin Maria (Vanessa Redgrave). "I think I might have some anger directed inwardly. Am I terrible?" Maria wisely leaves his question unanswered. "It's okay," she says. And it is. ...
Historical, rhetorical and phantasmagorical, Ike Holter's explosive extravaganza Hit the Wall (Barrow Street Theatre) depicts the Stonewall Riots as a series of snap-fights and bitch battles that escalate to such a fever pitch during the nights of J...
So now we know: If Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet in the 1980s, the art world, circa 1993, would have spawned it instead. The New Museum's nostalgia trip "NYC 1993" surfs through five floors of primordial DIY video epics, outr sex, and self-a...
Since we have some tougher matters to digest this week, let's sweeten the deal by starting with dessert. I recommend, as the most deliciously silly theatrical treat in town, the 20th anniversary staging of David Ives's short-play omnibus, All in the...
Flowers wilt. Chocolates molder. Card stock yellows. Shakespeare knew--in his comedies and tragedies both--how abruptly even the purest love can sour into jealousy, hate, indifference. And yet, in the late plays particularly, he also shows how mirac...
Zosia Mamet, of Girls fame, stars in Paul Downs Colaizzo's Really Really for MCC Theater. You might also expect to see the name of her father, David Mamet, somewhere on the program. Colaizzo's college-set script about a frat-party encounter between ...
Jesus was, by most accounts, the original hippie--sporting long hair and sandals, and spreading peace and love among Jews and Romans alike. But even if you're on board with the idea that Christ belonged at Woodstock, you probably don't imagine his f...
"Confidential." That was the beguiling subject of an e-mail seemingly randomly addressed to the Village Voice in mid-September. "I represent the artist Banksy," the message began, "and I would like to talk… More >>
There’s something stupid about the ongoing condemnation of Millennials happening now in our culture. You know, the one that asks questions like: "Why are Generation Y yuppies so unhappy?" and… More >>
Jonas Wood's new paintings present seemingly straightforward scenes—rooms devoid of people, a poker tournament on TV—that front for dazzling formal invention. In some pieces Wood focuses on his childhood home, yet… More >>
Adriano Shaplin's gonzo epic Sarah Flood in Salem Mass blends Our Town and The Crucible with verve, slang, and hallucinogenic beaver stew. (Yes, the Wooster Group did it first—minus the… More >>
If the effigies of famous Yankees sluggers at Madame Tussauds aren't lifelike enough for you, cross 42nd Street to watch Eric Simonson's Bronx Bombers, a veritable walking-talking wax museum of… More >>
If Broadway musicals had trailers like movies, the one for Big Fish might go something like this: Meet Edward Bloom! He's a father and a husband with a big heart—and… More >>
What happens to a political play that's three decades old? Can it keep its emotional charge, or does it wither when its social relevance fades? You may be asking these… More >>
You might assume that the Photoshop fantasias of our age would make the visual conundrums of René Magritte's pre-war paintings feel quaint. Certainly the beguiling originality of his fractured figures… More >>
The theater is a swindle, an exercise in sham. Every play operates on principles of treachery: Flimsy set pieces substitute for solid spaces; people assume names and accents other than… More >>
Provocations don't come much gentler than Ain Gordon's Not What Happened, which concluded a brief run at BAM's Next Wave Festival. A meditation on truth and historical accuracy, directed by… More >>