Category: Theater

  Do I want to go to Mars? Not really, no. I was never one of those kids who looked up at the night sky and pointed to the stars and said “woah.” I haven’t even seen, for instance,  Interstellar. Mars, space, the universe—these are infinitely far places that never quite landed deeply enough in…

Set in the year 2000, flip phones are everywhere in Humpty Dumpty. The two central couples, Hallmark characters with high-power city jobs, spend much of the play walking around desperately waving their phones in the air in search of a signal. It’s particularly egregious, then, that none of them can act their way through the…

TRADITION: it’s what survives into the next generation, what parents and teachers pass along to their children, and what we find ourselves replicating for better or worse. If the present is obligated to honor the memory of what came before, what flexibility, in turn, do our traditions owe us? How can customs repeat if they’re…

  Every American town has some marker that sets it apart from every other American town. I’m not talking about geography, population, values, or even baseball teams, but rather, those quirky pieces of trivia you share at dinner parties with out-of-towners. The famed house on Cherry Creek Lane built to emulate a ship and featured…

Sartre was right when he said that “hell is other people”. Nothing can encapsulate the feeling of purgatory like a family vacation at a rented lake house. Sartre’s full quote should actually read, I think, something like, “hell is other people, and so are AirBnBs furnished entirely from IKEA”. There is something uncanny about occupying…

Language: as much as it lets us express ourselves, also lets us express how trapped we are in the prison of others’ buzzwords, binding decrees, and unforgiving commands. We don’t give babies enough credit, even though the sounds of their babble exceed the limits of any one of the languages we’re suffering within. Jerry Lieblich’s…

Earlier this month hours before ‘curtain’ on a Friday night show at SoHo Playhouse, I chose to brave the ‘last chance’ lines and attend the Edges of Ailey at The Whitney. What I saw was compelling. The display, curated by Adrienne Edwards, readily incorporates a range of materials, archival footage, paintings, old notebooks, and programs.…

In 2011, during the second year of the annual Fire This Time Festival, organizers produced the work of an up-and-coming playwright named Dominique Morriseau. The writer, now known as a MacArthur Fellow, an Artist in Residence at Signature Theater, and a Tony Nominee, still had another ten years before she would be called one of…