Category: Theater
-
An Artistic Inheritance: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research
“What do we carry? What do we inherit?” On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research’s intimate loft space on Huron Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a preview of the revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act play, You Can’t Take It…
-
Serviceability with an Edge: A 21st Century Staging of the 1937 Hit YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
You can’t knock You Can’t Take it With You. The 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play, which just enjoyed a production at the Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, remains popular among high schools for good reason: its extended cast of kooky characters, absurd politics, and parlor-room fun is as American and serviceable as apple pie. This…
-
In REVOLUTION, Brett Neveu presents a radical vision of celebrations and the friends who make them possible
“Celebrations are rare these days.” That’s what Jame says to her best friend, Puff, the recently promoted and highly anxious manager at Revolution Cuts, a chain hair salon nestled in the middle of a strip mall somewhere in America. They’re trying to decide what to do to commemorate Puff’s 26th birthday, but so far, all…
-
THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH IS THE: A Conversation with Hallie Chametzky on Gertrude Stein and Nuanced Reckonings
I was sixteen in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time. I went to the March for Our Lives in Boston. I fastened witty political buttons to my denim jacket. I put “activist” in my internet profiles, right next to “dancer” and “artist.” I’d been online for years, so I knew the importance…
-
In SOONEST MENDED, Matthew Gasda Shows Off the Fashionable Foibles of the Educated Elite
I could picture the eye rolls coming, the sheer exasperation. There could be no other reaction. “It’s a play about this Brooklyn couple– they’ve been married for years, now they’re opening things up”. “Of course it is.” Sitting down for a late-night coffee at a Qahwah House in Morningside Heights, I struggled to explain my…
-
Heloise Wilson’s ASTRONAUTS WANTED: An Approachable Story Written Deftly
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…
-
A(U)NTS! Up Close
With her uncanny ability to capture highly-specific instances and deeply darkly kept-secret feelings, along with her bravery to really go there with descriptions of the body and all of its innate gore, Zoë Geltman imagines a world where women can be disgustingly free.
-
Eric Bogosian’s HUMPTY DUMPTY Shows Its Age.
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 NYTW’s BECOMING EVE Being Jewish is Living in Paradox
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…
-
The Whales are Missing: In Abe Koogler’s DEEP BLUE SOUND, Politics Linger While Characters Humanize and The Audience is Drawn Near
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…
-
In Dan Blick’s LAKE GEORGE, Hell is the Liminality of A Holiday and A Rented Lake House
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…
-
Dear Kayla Farrish, Burn it Down! At Least the Ashes Will Enrich the Earth
Imagine being told that what you have just experienced did not actually happen the way you experienced it, that it was actually just a collection of dissonant apparitions created by your own strained need to link unrelated events together.