The Antiquities

February 5, 2025

Drama, Reviews

Colin Macdonald

Stories on stage and screen that engage with, critique, or warn about artificial intelligence (AI) are as much in vogue as AI itself. McNeal, about art and AI, recently concluded its Broadway run; We Are Your Robots and Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience addressed collective veneration of the technology Off-Broadway; and Companion, a twisted and funny exploration of human and nonhuman desire, opened this month in movie theaters. Now, Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, an episodic look at our current technological moment—or precipice—through the artificial eyes of the future, enters the AI discourse at Playwrights Horizons (co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre).

February 4, 2025

Drama, Experimental Theater, Reviews, Solo Performance

Edward Karam

Beckett Briefs

Beckett Briefs, the rubric for three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre, provides a rare look at works by the dramatist whose Waiting for Godot has overshadowed all theater since the mid-20th-century. The progression of plays devised by director Ciarán Hinds moves from the slightest, Not I, featuring only a mouth speaking, to Play, in which only three heads appear, to the longest, and most fruitfully theatrical, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, head to toe. All three works are suffused with regrets about or outrage at the setbacks, blunders, jealousy, and dishonesty in the characters’ lives.

January 29, 2025

Drama, Reviews

Deirdre Donovan

Cymbeline

Although the all-Asian, all-female production of Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline by the National American Asian Theatre Company (NAATCO) doesn’t succeed on all dramatic fronts, it’s brimming with vitality. It draws on fairy-tale elements, including a wicked queen, an unscrupulous villain, a wronged hero, and an extended scene of revelations that give it the aura of a fairy tale. Cymbeline perhaps can best be summed up as a myth of national origin that reveals how the British and Roman heritages came together under its ancient, peace-loving title character.

January 28, 2025

Drama, Reviews

Stanford Friedman

Kowalski

It was the summer of 1947, and Tennessee Williams needed a man—a leading man, that is, for his newest work, a feral little melodrama called A Streetcar Named Desire. Veteran film star John Garfield was the top contender for the part, but as posited in Kowalski, Gregg Ostrin’s seductive, and occasionally true new play, a 23-year-old Marlon Brando won the role of Stanley over the course of a single, drink-filled evening at Williams’s bungalow in Provincetown, Mass.

January 16, 2025

Comedy, Reviews, Immersive/Interactive

Edward Karam

Mindplay

The cover photo of Stagelight, the playbill for Mindplay, shows Vinny DePonto, its star (and co-writer, with Josh Koenigsberg) with a swarthy, tight-lipped, foreboding visage. He might easily have just emerged from a coffin in Transylvania, but, thankfully, on stage DePonto is engaging, earnest and unthreatening. In explaining the raison d’être of his show, he mentions his own anxieties, including being subject to panic attacks. “Your mind takes over your body if you’re one of those people,” he says. “I’m one of those people.”

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