Nick Vaughn and Jake Margolin's A Marriage has modest ambitions. The two conceptual/performance artists, married in 2008, want viewers to contemplate gay marriage, queer assimilation, and fetishization of the suburbs. In contrast to their humble aim...
The title of Richard Greenberg's new play, The Assembled Parties (Friedman Theatre), carries multiple meanings. Its "parties" are a pair of Christmas dinners, occurring 20 years apart, and also the oddly assorted individuals who gather for them--mem...
Ben Durham doesn't seem like the sort of guy who would be involved with criminals and delinquents. He has the earnest and measured mien of a philosophy student. But Durham's subjects for "Portraits, Maps, Texts," his second--and final--solo exhibiti...
A recent college grad finds himself back home, careerless and directionless. His rich father, interfering stepmother, and doting grandmother suggest various professions and pursuits, but he can't stick with anything for long. Left to his own devices...
Rachel Kushner was the girl who spent her teens sneaking onto the backs of motorcycles in California. Today, a couple of decades later, she's the novelist who is writing about girls on bikes and becoming something of a literary phenomenon in the pro...
The onstage installation which the audience is invited to come up and inspect before the performance of Colm Toibin's Testament of Mary (Walter Kerr Theatre) includes a live vulture, an object of fascination to me. My experience of vultures is limit...
A serious golfer, artist Charles McGill knows from bad lies. In 1997, he photographed himself playing through a vacant lot in Harlem, firing off elegant fades amid blowing trash, shattered bricks, and rusting rebar. A few years later, his job at the...
Roaming through MOMA's chockablock installation of highlights from Claes Oldenburg's early career, you can sense a febrile mind and lightning-speed hands digging out from under the sludge of late-term Abstract Expressionism. It's 1960, and for inspi...
Douglas Carter Beane's The Nance (Lyceum Theatre) has got what it deserves from Lincoln Center Theater: a first-rate production, handsomely staged by Jack O'Brien, with a gigantically fine performance by Nathan Lane in the title role. Beane's play d...
Here's a test you can take to help determine whether shelling out $150-plus for the Motown musical is for you. Head on over to YouTube, and find the Jackson Five singing "Who's Loving You" on The Ed Sullivan Show. As he patters before the song kicks...
This spring, Congress is yet again taking up the debate over immigration reform. And for every day politicians spend arguing over the fate of workers already in the U.S., one or two immigrants--and sometimes more--will die just trying to get here. ...
If you were to wander backstage, into green rooms and dressing rooms and the dark spaces of the wings, you might hear performers whispering a cheery, "Break a leg!" They don't mean it. No actor, save a very disgruntled understudy, really wishes disa...
The Women's Project tends to favor domestic comedies that play like tragedies. Or maybe it's the other way around. Recent shows such as Jackie, Bethany, Apple Cove, Lascivious Something, and Smudge show mothers and fathers, and husbands and wives, d...
Edgar and Alice are soon to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. What would constitute an appropriate gift? Arsenic? Cyanide? A neatly sharpened saber? Never has marriage seemed more devilishly injurious than in August Strindberg's 1900 The D...
Macbeth is one of the loneliest characters Shakespeare ever wrote. He sacrifices everything to his ravenous ambition--sleep, friendship, loyalty, conscience; even, eventually, his loving if twisted marriage--leaving him to enjoy his hard-won ascent ...
Any Broadway show has much to live up to: burgeoning production costs; audience hopes inflated by high ticket prices; competition from film, television, and the dozens of other shows glutting Times Square. But Lyle Kessler's Orphans, now revived at ...
The new Broadway revival of the musical Jekyll & Hyde feels more like an exhumation of sorts. Some may remember the first time it was here in the late '90s: Despite very little help from critics, it was nominated for four Tony Awards and was kept go...
What did Shakespeare think about during his fallow final years? The playwright's retirement remains a mystery. We find it hard to imagine that one of humanity's greatest literary minds could be content with the fatted life of a gentleman farmer. But...
Adoption, a touchy subject in all instances, is the ostensible topic of The Call (Playwrights Horizons), a small, tautly written, tidy--perhaps over-tidy-new play by the gifted Tanya Barfield. And like some adopted children, The Call turns out to be...
Missed out on spring break? Ready to spend a few sun-drenched afternoons on an island drinking Chteauneuf-du-Pape and eating tarte tatin while waiting for romance? Then Eterniday, Witness Relocation's new dance-theater piece (now running at La MaMa...
A sense of humor about the macabre, as well as a love for the underbelly of American society pervades "Zoe Strauss: 10 Years," a survey of Strauss's work currently open… More >>
Many among the crowd that gathered around a patch of graffiti on the corner of a vacant, crumbling building in Tribeca earlier this month had no clue why they stopped… More >>
What do you picture when you hear the word magician? Maybe David Copperfield. Or a birthday party. "Magic suffers from the people who do magic," Derek DelGaudio says. DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães,… More >>
Sometimes, a few well-delivered laugh lines are what makes a production tick. Other times, though, straining for levity strikes a sour note—especially when the subjects at hand are rape, murder,… More >>
Fictional characters are such hapless creatures. Doomed to lives composed of unfortunate choices, secrets, and tragic flaws, their faith supported by mere circumstantial evidence, they flounder in the footlights. These… More >>
Classic Stage Company’s new production of Romeo and Juliet—ably directed by Tea Alagić—has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, some of its virtues are double-edged. It’s admirably uncluttered: The sparse… More >>
When Sean O'Casey put pen to paper for Juno and the Paycock, the 1924 Dubliner domestic drama set against the ghastly Irish Civil War, the playwright's country was in a… More >>
Odd that a play so steeped in loneliness should burst with such life. The Team's RoosevElvis, a stirring, absurd, and grandly human historical-cosplay road-trip fantasia, centers on a depressed North… More >>
The Roundabout's Broadway house specializes in well-upholstered revivals. Few come better carpeted, curtained, and papered than The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan's 1946 play about a family seeking justice for a… More >>
As David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette begins at Soho Rep, actors array tiers of delectable pastel macarons. You might be tempted to snatch one. Restrain yourself. Adjmi is a playwright with… More >>