Dan Lauria

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Just Another Day

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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.

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Morning’s at Seven

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Morning’s at Seven

Paul Osborn’s play Morning’s At Seven is one of theater’s great rescues. A flop on Broadway in 1939, it was resurrected in 1980 by director Vivian Matalon, whose peerless production established it as a classic piece of Americana. It’s a gentle satire on small-town life, with busybodies and petty jealousies and snobbery, and although it’s as sturdily constructed as a Chekhov play, it’s not as dark. There may be conflicts, but the characters have more fun—and are fun to be around.

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The Stone Witch

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The Stone Witch

The ups and downs of the creative process are personified as “beasts which must be tamed” in The Stone Witch, a new play by Shem Bitterman. The work is a somewhat convoluted and ultimately contrived attempt to tackle the psychological complexities of creating art. And while Steve Zuckerman’s production is visually and aurally rich, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

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