Here's something to celebrate: Next year will mark two decades since history came to an end. In 1989, the Cold War fell apart: the Berlin Wall crumbled, the Soviet Union began to dissolve, and the West triumphantly climbed atop the rubble. Francis Fu...
In 1959, with Abstract Expressionism triumphant over a then much smaller art world, the Museum of Modern Art mounted "New Images of Man," an exhibition of existential, passionate, melodramatic figuration. Roundly panned at the time as airy humanism ...
Big-league London gallery Albion is plotting an expansion into New York. While plans for a David Adjaye-designed space remain in the future, Albion's New York director, David Ross--onetime head of the Whitney--has already set up a beachhead in a tem...
The project space in a gallery or nonprofit is a bit like a backyard shed: You generally can't see it from the street, and plenty of people visit and leave without knowing it exists. It's not quite like the teenager who built a nuclear reactor in th...
I've invited novelist Paul Beatty to meet me at a restaurant that no longer exists. Informed that the writer lives in the East Village, I'd suggested meeting at Alphabet Kitchen on Avenue A. It's a nice, quiet place--perfect for an interview on a sc...
It was Assignment Day, which, despite its sound, is not a Calvinist adumbration of the Last Judgment, but rather a weekly occurrence in the arts sections of The Village Voice. And our esteemed culture editor was, naturally, asking me what I wanted t...
"I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." So ends The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett's inscrutable and very nearly unreadable 1953 novel. Irish actor Barry McGovern has taken those words to heart. For 23 years, he's gone on, performing his distillation ...
Collective: Unconscious, a fixture of New Yorks alternative theater scene since its founding 13 years ago, has announced that it will permanently close its theater on July 31. On that date, the lease for its 279 Church Street facility will expire an...
. . . AND I PREDICT THAT NEXT WEEK MONTH, YOUR (LEAST) FAVORITE SHIT TALKER WILL RETURN!
You've seen many of these black-and-white photos reproduced countless times--the piet of a Japanese mother floating her deformed daughter in the bath, a G.I. cradling his wounded comrade on Okinawa, a welder's goggles glinting in bright contrast to...
Photography astounds us by its very ubiquity. If there exist, in the 21st century, lives still unrecorded by the camera, or corners of the world where photography's reach has not yet penetrated, their purview is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, ...
Some dancegoers crave movement that's difficult and exciting--maybe aggressively sexy. Some need a drama they can relate to, but one that's also racier or more colorful than anything in their daily lives. Audiences who saw recent works by Neil Green...
In a rueful quip that still rings true, the Swiss playwright Friedrich Drrenmatt once joked that tragedy, in the classical sense, was no longer possible because today "Creon's secretaries close Antigone's books." The Polish theater company TR Warsz...
Misha Shulman sure has a thing for ducks. In the collection of sketches Brunch at the Luthers (and Other Quacks), the playwright/actor delivers a brief monologue, "The Meaning of a Duck," and in his featured one-act, "Brunch at the Luthers," each and...
Bash'd! had me at "cocksuckaz." When Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow--two white Canadians who look more like character actors than rappers--strut onto the Zipper stage in off-pink duds to a big, stomping beat and throw down multisyllabic rhymes like...
HOT!, the annual summer-long queer performance festival, is in its 17th steamy season at Dixon Place, and though its new Chrystie Street digs will be more spacious, nestling into your seat in the tiny second-floor black box at 258 Bowery is half the ...
The current Iraq War has produced obvious casualties--some 29,000 U.S. soldiers injured and 4,100 killed, to say nothing of civilian deaths. But playwright Judith Thompson concerns herself with collateral damage: a soldier coerced; a scientist betray...
Sew what? asks this drama by Anthony Neilson. The playwright is a proponent of Britain's in-yer-face theater, a naughtily assaultive style that confronts the audience with extreme situations and language. In Stitching, now making its American debut,...
It's a pity that Floria Lasky (1923-2007), Jerome Robbins's wise, feisty lawyer and adviser for much of his professional life, couldn't stick around to see the New York City Ballet's Jerome Robbins Celebration (dedicated to her and honoring the chore...
After a six-year stint in Cirque du Soleils racy Zumanity in Las Vegas, drag legend Joey Arias makes a triumphant return downtown in the wonderfully bizarre Arias With a Twist. Co-starring a multitude of colorful creatures by director-puppeteer B...
In 1588, Queen Elizabeth rode to Tilbury and delivered a speech rousing the troops against the Spanish Armada. "I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble… More >>
Depending on who you are, Eternal will seem endlessly fascinating or flat-out boring. Director Daniel Fish has recorded two actors (Christina Rouner and Thomas Jay Ryan) on two channels of… More >>
Holocaust humor: a tricky genre, best attempted with truly revelatory material or not at all. And in the case of Donald Margulies's The Model Apartment—a dark comedy about survivors, revived… More >>
Out with the samovar, in with the Irish folk tunes! We need new forms! In keeping with the make-it-revolutionary spirit of Anton Chekhov's tormented young artist character Constantine, Culture Project's… More >>
Inside the Metropolitan's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor galleries is the perviest art exhibition to be found anywhere in New York: "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations." The canvases on… More >>
"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 Tussaud's aren't lifelike enough for you, cross 42nd Street to watch Eric Simonson's Bronx Bombers, a veritable walking-talking wax museum of… More >>