Author: Catherine Sawoski

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…

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…

  I spent the two hours after leaving Honeyland thinking about how it could be rewritten into a passable show. It was a frustrating task. What should one do with a musical whose surface goes no deeper than a 1960s Wikipedia page?  The show, which transferred to Off-Broadway’s Triad Theater from an original run in…

  The ‘Cellino v. Barnes’ play ads have been almost as inescapable as their real-life inspirations in recent months. Facebook and Instagram have become virtual billboards with plastered actors across the screen in mock legal commercials declaring that you, the onlooker, have been ‘served.’ It’s only fitting. The Ross Cellino and Steven Barnes that most…

Few things make you feel as lucky to live in New York as being around artists at the beginning of their careers. This is certainly the case with ELEGIE, a nascent theater company founded this past summer by Kara Gordon with an inventive production of Jean Genet’s The Maids. The show, which follows two housemaids…

Matthew Freeman, like most New York City creatives, has a day job. The award-winning playwright, who premiered his latest play, The Ask, in early September, spends his time out of the theater as a giving director at the ACLU. For the past thirteen years, he has asked rich, liberal donors for vast sums of money,…

You – just you – walk into an empty space. The only thing visible is a note with a phone number on it, and when the voice on the other line picks up, it asks you to acknowledge that you are completely alone. It tells you to close your eyes. Fall backward, it says. Someone…

  The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, based out of a loft in Greenpoint, is known for shows that tread the line of intellectualism and indulgence. Playwright and director Matthew Gasda, who, since writing Dimes Square, has become the center of its downtown scene, introduces and closes out each production. “That’s the play,” Gasda jumps…