Every once in a while, if we are lucky, we stumble upon a work of art so staggering that it whirls about our memories long after our initial encounter. Something about it, even if we can’t pinpoint what that “something” is (which, of course, only adds to its intrigue), resonates. A most curious kabuki-based play, [...]
Category Archives: Reviews
Dickens’ “Hard Times”
February 15, 2010 – 3:58 pm
This week, the Pearl Theatre parts its curtains for Stephen Jeffrey’s page-to-stage adaptation of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. After sitting through the production, I contemplated suggesting an addendum to the Playbill. Perhaps, a WARNING on the cover: “This play is long, and the chairs are Amish in comfort level.” But, I realize that such [...]
David Mamet’s “Race”
February 15, 2010 – 10:10 am
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 [...]
Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”
February 4, 2010 – 1:56 pm
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Surely it would be blasphemy to suggest that the strongest suit in Sam Shepard’s fecund, polymath deck is his prose. His plays have won him the Pulitzer (“Buried Child”). His acting has garnered an Oscar nomination (The Right Stuff). His direction on stage and screen is highly respected, or better. But it [...]
Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon
January 27, 2010 – 10:00 am
In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo the slave-owner offers the grim yet illuminating commentary, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” This idea is a reflection of mortality—life as a flicker—and it hovers above Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon, opening this week at the Atlantic Theater. Although [...]
Review: Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman
January 19, 2010 – 9:03 am
One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned [...]
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 [...]
