John Lithgow is perfectly cast as Joseph Alsop, the venomous, fanatically anti-communist newspaper columnist who built a career off his access and influence with U.S. presidents and politicians. But as David Auburn’s play shows, he was not a garden variety right-winger. Auburn (Proof) adds depth and subtlety to the character by highlighting his contradictions. He had the courage to oppose the vicious Senator Joseph McCarthy, though it’s not clear here why.
The house in Brooklyn seems ramshackle. Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) enters it slowly, wearily, pushing through the dreary light, carrying two leather cases that seem weighted down more with his angst than with anything he could be carrying. It is Hoffman‘s best moment in the play. For the rest, he portrays Loman too much on one note, in a voice too raucous that doesn‘t quite give us the sense of tragedy Arthur Miller intended. Or maybe I‘m remembering the superb Brian Dennehy in the role in 1999. And director Mike Nichols has put together a cast that doesn’t quite come together.
A luscious feast for the soul, “The Big Meal” by Dan Le Franc is a simple but charming, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes serious family drama with four pairs of males and females playing characters as they age through 80 years and four generations. The notion is simple and might be a bit schmaltzy, but under Sam Gold‘s crisp direction, it is smart and sensitive.
It‘s the American frontier in the late 1800s. The wood cabin set is probably too burnished to resemble the shabbier wood of the time, but you get the idea. What is surprising is that setting Shakespeare‘s play in a time and place when women were extremely independent and self-reliant, director Arin Arbus – a woman – has given it an egregiously sexist staging.
The Signature Theater Company revival of Edward Albee‘s 1977 play is subtle and biting at the same time, an allegory wrapped in what could have been a dark neighbors sitcom.
The party Sam (a sensitive Michael Hayden) and Jo (a tough and powerful Laila Robins) are hosting in their suburban house for some friends seems pretty deadly. How can they be having a party when Jo, curled up in an easy chair, is dying of a cancer which occasionally sets her to writhing in pain. She sets it out pretty clear, pretty early: “I am your wife and I am dying.”
Monica Bauer‘s play about jazz and race, presented by Urban Stages, is a finely polished gem. Inspired by the playwright‘s youth in Omaha, Nebraska, it is a love song to jazz and its ability to unite people across color lines and also a sorrowful memoir of the time in the sixties when racism erupted into riotous violence. Director Frances Hill uses frequent jazz passages and projections (by Kevin R. Frech) to create mood and reality in an intimate space.
In almost a chamber concert of a play, memory and fantasy intrude in Tina Howe‘s drama of a family in which the parents are in decline from their artistically productive years and the daughter is moving up. Her feelings for them are part love and part resentment at what she sees as their self-centered interference with her own artistic development and triumphs.
Annabella (Lydia Wilson), a young woman in black leggings, puts on rock music and dances to it. Wilson plays her as she might an insouciant high-fashion model. Men in suits come on the stage prancing, knees jutting up to the disco beat.
This is Parma and a bloody story of incest and revenge will be told, though not exactly as 17th-century author John Ford had in mind. It‘s a stunning campy melodrama by Britain‘s inimitable Cheek by Jowl company.
For me the most shocking moment in Katori Hall’s play, Hurt Village, was when two grungy teens amuse themselves with a nasty rap in which they cruelly and crudely insult each other and their families. In this down-at-the-heels housing project in Memphis, even these kids’ amusement is mean and self-destructive. Forget about normal civility. The people we meet address each other as nigger, bitch, and mother fucker.
It has been reported today, March 17, that Mike Davey made up many of the details in his monologue about Apple and the workers who make its electronics at the huge Chinese factory, Foxconn, described in the review below. Some of those facts are true about dangerous working conditions are true, but not as he said them. He described meeting workers poisoned with hexane. In fact, such a problem occurred 1,000 miles away. There have been under-age workers at some Apple suppliers, but he didn’t meet a gaggle of them at Foxconn. His interpreter was reached by another reporter, Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for the radio show Marketplace, and she denied that Davey met 13-year-old workers or a man with a mangled hand. Davey’s response was that he is not a journalist.
Athol Fugard’s 1961 parable about apartheid South Africa, directed by the author at the Signature Theatre, blazes with its audacious concept and staging. It is one of those small number of plays that stand out for both their literary and political significance.
Marieann Meringolo’s rich mellow slightly jazzy alto voice presents Michel Legrand’s romantically charged music with almost theatrical intensity. Legrand, famous for music for such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Yentl, needs someone like Meringolo to provide the necessary drama to his muse.
I hated this 1956 play by John Osborne, one of the angry young men of England’s 1950s. That era was a bad time for women in the U.S. and according to the production directed by Sam Gold for the Roundabout Theatre Company, it was true in spades in England.
This pretentious play by the otherwise talented playwright Theresa Rebeck gives writers a bad name. Four wanna be novelists fork over $5000 to get ten lessons from Leonard (Alan Rickman), a failed writer turned book editor, who must represent every nasty, self-centered writer or editor Rebeck ever met.
This could almost be about any wealthy family, except it is not, because they are black. The Levays (we meet the father and kids but not the wife) are rich, because Dad is a neurosurgeon. So they’ve got a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. In case you doubted his wealth, there is a Romare Bearden on the wall.
The irony of Vivian Bearing, a profession of John Donne’s poetry, fighting a futile battle against Ovarian cancer, is caught in Donne’s most famous work, Death be not proud. It is a challenge that says mortals will cheat death through eternal life. Pulling an IV pole or sitting in a hospital bed, a red baseball cap covering a scalp made bald from chemotherapy, Cynthia Nixon is cynical and acerbic as the 47-year-old professor. She expertly portrays this unflinching woman’s struggle to keep her soul.
Playwright Athol Fugard is most known for distilling into intimate personal stories the physical and spiritual struggles against apartheid in South Africa. In this engrossing play he plies the same theme, but this time it’s not about blacks and coloreds, but about women and non-conformists. A society that keeps the former in thrall will without too much difficulty stomp on the latter. And Fugard asserts that they have to fight back as much as the racial victims.
David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish is a highly improbable but entertaining diversion about a U.S. sign-company owner from Cleveland who goes to China to persuade government tourism officials that they need better translations. For example, Deformed men’s toilet doesn’t quite cut it for handicapped men’s toilet. The play benefits from comic, fast-paced direction by Leigh Silverman.
Eric Schaeffer’s moving, elegant production of Follies is dramatic proof of Steven Sondheim’s brilliance – the subtle combination of emotional focus and scintillating musical panache and wit. It is said best by the show’s name, Follies, which has a double meaning. It refers to the high-kicking vaudeville show the women of the show danced in their youths and to the foolish decisions of human beings. The book is by James Goldman, who is perfectly attuned to Sondheim’s sensibility.
Weird is relative, you might say about the characters in these three rather bizarre comedies about relatives as a connecting theme. The self-involvement of a wife when her husband dies, the revelations set off by a couple who flee a wedding at which one was to be wed, the impact of marital conflict on an unborn son, everything turns on the unexpected, which of course is what makes memorable comedy.
In the mid-1980s I went to Peshawar on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to write about the war between the Russians and Afghans going on across the divide. It all came rushing back during J.T. Rogers’ gripping theatrical docudrama of what went wrong then (and it was virtually all wrong) with American policy in Afghanistan.
Sutton Foster’s performance in Cole Porter’s frivolous, sophisticated Anything Goes glitters as much as the gold sequins on her clothes. She is one of the great musical actresses of our day, and she has a field day showing it in this 1934 musical, featuring a scintillating score with, in addition to the title song, numbers such as I Get a Kick Out of You, You’re the Top, Easy to Love, and It’s De-lovely. Porter’s music and lyrics are still unmatched for invoking the spirit of light-hearted romance.
Cynical and romantic, Noël Coward manages to be both in this charming pas de quatre about the impossibility of love. And this was in 1930!
Two couples find their honeymoons in the south of France held hostage to the marriage that one of each duo had with the other five years before. Might not be a problem, except the sparks that ignited the earlier romance have not been quenched. In fact, it doesn’t take much for the smoldering embers to ignite.
Mary Testa is thrilling in Michael John LaChiusa’s cantata about the true-life Anna Edson Taylor, a gutsy, idiosyncratic woman who in 1901 went over Niagara Falls in an oak barrel she had designed. She was 63, had an overwhelming sense of self and saw this as the defining moment to prove there was greatness in her.
