O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus) is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights. The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, [...]
Category Archives: Reviews
The Aliens
April 23, 2010 – 10:51 pm
Despite the darkness surrounding the three main characters of Annie Baker’s newest play, The Aliens, the show sustains a playful levity throughout much of its less than two hour runtime. Under Sam Gold’s direction, The Aliens is most alive when the two leads, a couple of thirty-something male vagabonds, and a seventeen-year-old restaurant employee about [...]
Pat Kinevane’s “Forgotten”
February 23, 2010 – 10:27 am
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
