May 18, 2024

Comedy, Drama, Reviews

Deirdre Donovan

The Axis Theatre Company’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is something to celebrate. Directed by Randall Sharp, and superbly performed by a 12-member ensemble cast, this Twelfth Night is a wild and wonderful romp through Illyria.

May 16, 2024

Drama, Multimedia, Reviews

Nicole Colbert

Here There Are Blueberries

Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.

Here There Are Blueberries

May 15, 2024

Drama, Reviews

Charles Wright

October 7: A Verbatim Play

October 7: A Verbatim Play by Phelim McAleers depicts events in the Gaza Envelope of southwest Israel on the day of last year’s attack by the Islamist organization Hamas. It’s based on interviews conducted by McAleers and his wife, journalist-filmmaker Ann McElhinnie, immediately after the siege that reportedly killed 1,200 people, wounded an estimated 5,400, and resulted in seizure by Hamas of more than 250 hostages. In a May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, President Joe Biden lamented that, eight months after the assault (and despite ongoing warfare in Israel and Gaza), “people are already forgetting” the brutality of that day. McAleer’s play is agitprop against forgetfulness, burning a sense of the day’s agony into playgoers’ imaginations.

October 7: A Verbatim Play

May 14, 2024

Reviews, Drama

Marc Miller

Just Another Day

It’s I’m Not Rappaport meets Waiting for Godot meets The Gin Game! Take two old codgers on a park bench, combine with existential meanderings in a fixed setting, season with the ravages of aging, and you have Just Another Day, Dan Lauria’s uncertain reflection on all three components (but especially the third). Just Another Day suffers from being too much—well, just another day. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and a great deal of curiously multisyllabic palaver fills out the hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. But it does have two actors very much worth seeing, for Lauria has cast himself, and opposite him, a flawless Patty McCormack.

Just Another Day

May 12, 2024

Comedy, Drama, Reviews

Deirdre Donovan

Summer means free theater in New York, and Molière in the Park, an organization co-founded by Lucie Tiberghien and Garth Belcon. The Miser becomes the third free production at LeFrak Center, following The Misanthrope (2022) and Tartuffe (2023). Directed by Tiberghien, it’s an invigorating new version of the French playwright’s 1668 satire.

Edward Karam

October 18, 2017

Red Bull readings of classic plays scheduled

Edward Karam

October 18, 2017

This season’s series of Revelation Readings by the Red Bull Theater will focus on the themes of love and its madness. The Monday night readings, which present rarely performed classic plays, open on Nov. 13 with The Rover by Aphra Behn. They continue on Dec. 11 with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Jan. 15 with Victor Hugo’s Hernani; Feb. 12 with Molière’s Don Juan; March 19 with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist; April 16 with The Second Maiden’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton; and on May 14 with another Molière play, A Doctor in Spite of Himself. The final presentation will be The Clandestine Marriage by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder. The readings will feature a number of renowned performers, including Drama Desk winner John Douglas Thompson in The Alchemist and Tony Award winner Stephen Spinella, with Patrick Page, in Doctor Faustus. All readings take place on Monday evenings at 7:30 p.m. at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.). For more information, visit www.redbulltheater.com.

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Edward Karam

October 31, 2016

Reviews, Drama

Coriolanus

Edward Karam

October 31, 2016

Reviews, Drama

The playbill for the Red Bull production of Shakespeare’s rarely staged Coriolanus gives the time period as "Rome, 493 B.C.E. Here, now." But, under Michael Sexton’s direction, the latter prevails: military men in camouflage fatigues and dress greens, a First Citizen with a T-shirt that reads “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” and several female soldiers all declare it’s now. There’s virtually nothing identifiable from 493 B.C.E.

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