On writing
Icebergs is a light and reassuring comedy about deciding whether to have children in a worsening world. Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse has created a fine production for the world premier of playwright Alena Smith’s sit-com script. Audiences will enjoy a classic realistic set, purposeful direction, and good comedic acting. The production, directed by Randall Arney, … Read more
The Napa Playhouse just completed its run of Yasmina Reza’s 2009 play, God of Carnage, and they did very well. God of Carnage might have been aptly entitled A Delicate Balance, if Edward Albee had not already used that for another play with a similar thematic interest. Albee’s play uneasily reveals the fragile, delicate balance … Read more
Richard Maxwell’s February 2012 production of The Early Plays (three Eugene O’Neill one-acts) at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, in cooperation with The Wooster Group, seems to me baffling and unsuccessful. The plays themselves are very weak and very dated. They lack effective central themes, relying instead on the novelty (a century ago) of a … Read more
By far the best theatre I have seen in years is Krapp’s Last Tape, performed by John Hurt in a production created by the Gate Theatre in Dublin and brought to Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a brief run in November and December of 2011. John Hurt in the Gate production … Read more
Briefly playing in New York as part of the 2011 Lincoln Center Festival, The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Julius Caesar is an energetic version that emphasizes mise en scene rather than the text, and thus emphasizes the outsize political consequences of political power struggles. Personally, I prefer emphasis on language to spectacle, but spectacle … Read more
Mitch Giannunzio’s one-woman play, Lizzie Borden at Eight O’Clock, is about to finish its March-April 2011 run at the WorkShop Theater Company in Manhattan. The conceit of the play is that a few years after her acquittal for the infamous hatchet murders of her father and her step-mother, and after suffering the gossip and shunning … Read more
Kings: The Siege of Troy, an adaptation by Jim Milton of Christopher Logue’s wonderful poem entitled Kings, is ending its run this week (March 2011) at Manhattan’s Workshop Theatre. Handcart Ensemble, Verse Theater Manhattan, and WorkShop Theatre Company collaborated in this production, not that I know exactly what role each played. This was a fine, … Read more
The playwright David Ives appeared Feb. 24, 2010 at a Barnes & Noble in New York City, on a panel (promoting the new book The Play That Changed My Life) and made an interesting observation. Ives said that he had thought a lot about what David Mamet wrote in an article in The New York … Read more