With his aviator shades, shoulder-length locks, and blas good looks, Jack Goldstein could have fronted some '70s band you don't quite remember. In actuality, the Montreal native who grew up in Los Angeles was part of the first graduating class at C...
Audiences love obsessives. Set a character with a crazy, unquenchable hunger center stage and they eat it up, whether the character's hunger is for money, love, fame, or anything else. The public can often develop an unquenchable appetite of its own...
Did you order a side of magical realism with your moo goo gai pan? Is that a dash of absurdism in your tom yum? In Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon, a brisk, fantastical drama nominally set in a "Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese fast food restaurant...
Is Off-Broadway a galaxy far, far away? Stars effervesced Monday night, when theatrical luminaries and icons of TV and film thronged the East Village's Webster Hall to honor theatrical excellence blocks and boroughs distant from the Great White Way....
Mike Bartlett's vicious Bull, a nasty one-act dissection of office politics mapped onto a bullfight, represents a companion to his earlier Cock (2009), a full-length battle royale of sexual politics whose form refers to cockfighting. Is Story, abou...
What if composer Nikolai "Nicky" Nabokov, choreographer George Balanchine, composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Sergey Sudeikin, and a host of ex-wives, dancers, pianists, and the odd State Department official all gathered for a weekend on a Connecti...
Painters, even the most experimental ones, continually time-travel for inspiration. Right now, you can traverse half a millennium of painting within two dozen blocks on the Upper East Side. Begin with a conclave of panels by Piero della Francesca...
In the office lexicon, are there words more demoralizing than "corporate retreat"? Not for employees of Skyline Travel, the decaying agency at the center of Steven Levenson's workplace comedy Core Values. In headier times the company would take its...
Samuel (Rocco Sisto), the central figure of Richard Foreman's new work, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) (Public Theater), has a problem. Not a major problem--those were dealt with in Foreman's 1993 creation, Samuel's Major Problems. But a...
The sunshine. The palm trees. The dashing leading men. The lissome starlets. The spangles. The elephants? As you may have guessed, Ayub Khan Din's new musical Bunty Berman Presents ..., a mash note to the movies, takes place somewhat east of Hollyw...
Ever fancy yourself a politician? Perhaps a much-beloved mayor, or a city councilor staunchly shepherding your hometown along? If so, seize the chance (no campaign necessary) at City Council Meeting, a new participatory performance created by Mallor...
When you go home after living abroad, you inevitably leave part of yourself behind. If you were living in a different language, there are zesty idioms and forceful exclamations for which you now find no native equivalent--and maybe that means whole ...
Here's one of the toughest of all form vs. content dilemmas: How do you craft narrative art out of the slog of unhappy family life, making something true to that slog but not a slog itself? Bob Glaudini's A Family for All Occasions, the bruised-up b...
In 1958, a six-year-old Mad Magazine published a parody of America's fourth-most popular newsstand title, which they called Bitter Homes and Gardens. Among its articles were "They Built Their House on a Lot 22 Inches Wide"; a "How-The ..." column th...
A new musical about Alzheimer's disease? If you harbor suspicions that the musical, an all-American dramatic form, skews toward sentimentality, The Memory Show won't convince you otherwise. This two-hander, produced by the Transport Group Theatre Co...
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...
"How angry am I? You don't want to know," begins the gripping first chapter of Claire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs (Knopf). The furious voice belongs to Nora Eldridge, an unmarried 37-year-old elementary schoolteacher, dutiful daughter, an...
Three obstinate females--one fictional and two historical--dominated my theatergoing last week. Tenacious women make great showy roles for leading actresses, and also seem to have a stimulating effect on male writers: Medea and Tosca, Mistress Quick...
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...
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 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 >>