Archive for Theatre

Theatre Review: Krapp’s Last Tape

By Stephen Sossaman : December 19, 2011

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 [...]

Theatre Review: Julius Caesar

By Stephen Sossaman : August 1, 2011

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 [...]

Theatre Review: Lizzie Borden at Eight O’Clock

By Stephen Sossaman : March 27, 2011

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 of [...]

Theatre Review: Kings: The Siege of Troy

By Stephen Sossaman : March 27, 2011

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, engaging [...]

Theatre: David Ives on Self-Knowledge

By Stephen Sossaman : April 11, 2010

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 Times: [...]