James Spader, David Alan Grier and Richard Thomas in Race.
David Mamet’s newest drama, Race, currently showing at the Ethel Barrymore, begins with black attorney Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), of the high profile law firm Lawson and Brown, lecturing his potential client, the white and wealthy Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), about black people. Charles has [...]
Author Archives: Eric Rosenblum
David Mamet’s “Race”
February 15, 2010 – 10:10 am
Review: A Streetcar Named Desire
January 2, 2010 – 11:14 am
The particular brand of emotional devastation that comes at the end of viewing a great production of either of Tennessee Williams’s two best plays, The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, depends on the audience developing a sympathetic bond with the female lead. In The Glass Menagerie, we watch fragile innocent Laura Wingfield on [...]
Review: The Starry Messenger
November 30, 2009 – 2:43 am
During the course of the nearly three hour long world premiere of The Starry Messenger, writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s newest play, we witness the protagonist, Mark (Matthew Broderick) comfort his mistress Angela (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who has just lost her 9-year-old son; we see Angela, in her job as a hospital nurse, kiss a [...]
David Mamet’s Oleanna, reviewed by Eric Rosenblum
October 23, 2009 – 1:30 pm
Seen from the perspective of the play’s protagonist, a middle-aged professor named John, David Mamet’s Oleanna is a nightmarish tale; John’s fervent and earnest attempts to educate and connect with Carol, his failing undergraduate student, backfire when she files a sexual harassment complaint with the tenure committee. Suddenly, everything in John’s life is in danger [...]
Eric Rosenblum on David Mamet’s Keep Your Pantheon and School
October 7, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Don’t expect standard David Mamet fare at Atlantic Theater’s current mainstage offering of two of the playwright’s one-acts. The evening’s main attraction, Keep Your Pantheon is a farcical romp through ancient Rome featuring a group of horny homosexual thespians trying to come up with the rent for their acting studio. Not exactly a typical Mamet [...]
Our Town at Barrow Street Theater
March 25, 2009 – 4:10 pm
In the second act of director David Cromer’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, currently enjoying an open run at the Barrow Street Theater, the character of the Stage Manager, performed by Cromer himself, interrupts the play’s main storyline to reflect, as he is wont to do, on the nature of love and marriage:
“You know [...]
Review: “The Cherry Orchard,” BAM Harvey Theater, Jan. 3 – Mar. 8
February 6, 2009 – 2:57 pm
There’s a moment in Sam Mendes’ new production of “The Cherry Orchard” in which the pompous young manservant Yasha (Josh Hamilton) and his adoring lover Dunyasha (Charlotte Parry) are alone in a field, kissing. Yasha says he doesn’t like girls who are too forward. “…[A] girl must know her place,” he says. “If there’s one [...]
