The Debate Society is a taut little theater triad comprised of director Oliver Butler and wizardly actors Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos. Their 2006 production, The Snow Hen, took a Norwegian folk tale about an abandoned girl and wove it into a charmingly dark tapestry of melancholy and mystique. Now they’re back at the Ontological Theater (Richard Foreman’s regular digs) with The Eaten Heart, an enchanting mood-play very loosely inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century......

On Saturday I found myself cycling through the drizzling rain to The World Financial Center, an office building on the western edge of the former World Trade Center site. The occasion was Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl’s astonishing site-specific performance piece, Bird Eye Blue Print, presented in several rooms in an abandoned office for small audiences of 22 at a time. Upon receiving my ticket in the building’s lobby, I was asked to jot down......

The Receipt, a charmingly subversive play by a pair of brilliant blokes in town for the Brits Off Broadway festival, is framed by a future archeologist’s analysis of one Alan Wiley, a contemporary Londoner – though colleagues believe the city may have been called something like Glondon – and his strange, quixotic quest to find the “owner” of a receipt that he picks up on the street. The story is the right-brain child of Will......

Everybody wants to be a rock star, perhaps none more ardently than theater folk, some of whom have been prodding the form toward rock since the sixties. Sam Shepard famously insisted that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, not a playwright; recently the likes of theater company Les Freres Corbusier and playwright Adam Rapp (who moonlights in a band) have expressed a sensible desire to tap into the Bowery Ballroom demographic.......

Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense takes place in a Midwestern anytown where children have been steadily disappearing. In this self-described “grim fairy tale”, there are no clues to indicate the culprit; the townspeople (Klieg the butcher, Chuck the barber, Isaak the Russian custodian, Sorrell the punk librarian) are all eccentric but not particularly sinister. Rapp, to his credit, isn’t interested in whodunits; his focus here is the awkward courtship between the diminutive Sadie (brought to......

Lots of Broadway spectacles that promise “FUN!" amount to bloated, tuneless exercises in excess and enervation. So the New York premiere of Curtains, a murder-mystery musical comedy, serves as a rare example of all that can go right when a talented team of seasoned pros trust the time-tested basics of catchy songs, stellar dancing and breezy storytelling. And it’s a sign of how starved audiences are for solid musical theater that they roared with laughter......

When one thinks of King Lear, the image of a half-naked, feeble old man wailing away on a dark stage comes readily to mind. Shakespeare’s tragedy is typically performed as a bleak meditation on man’s helplessness in an inhospitable universe. So the current Public Theater production, starring Kevin Kline as Lear and Michael Cerveris as Kent, is something of a departure. From the haunting (but not heavy) Sondheim score to the colorful and inventive staging,......

There’s a boldly imaginative high-wire act happening the first week of every month at Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street Theatre. After a twenty minute bombardment of the loudest, most dreadful pre-show music ever, two men finally appear on a bare stage with no script and, for the next 50 minutes, dive headlong into the unknown without a net. Less seasoned pros might run the risk of a theatrical crash landing, but TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi......

It’s been said that one of the defining characteristics of punk rock – besides the anti-establishment attitude and DIY ethos – is the urge to transcend the barrier between the performer up on stage and the traditionally passive spectator. In that sense, there are few artists in today’s theater more punk than Wallace Shawn – which may come as a surprise to those who know him as “that guy” from such movies as The Princess......

Don’t tell the music bloggers, but Gloria Deluxe is one of the best kept secrets in New York’s indie-rock scene – even after opening for David Byrne at Bowery Ballroom. Armed to the teeth with – deep breath – guitar, trumpet, trombone, piano, drums, violin, viola, upright bass, accordion and the saw, the band has forged a cohesive yet eclectic sound that somehow manages to swing, rock and groove without collapsing under its own weight.......

At its best, Michael Puzzo’s two-character comedy, The Dirty Talk, blows by with a breezy jokiness that’s laugh-out-loud funny, but my periodic chuckling proved no match for the explosions of raucous laughter that repeatedly rocked the house. It was the kind of roaring laughter one imagines pealing from a well-lubricated Borscht-belt crowd; at times the howling was so disproportionate to the one-liner that sparked it that I had to fight the urge to look back......

In the weeks after 9/11, when Operation Infinite Justice (later re-branded Enduring Freedom) readied vengeance for peasants in Afghanistan, there were several writers who immediately stood out by simply noting the truth amidst an avalanche of jingoism. One that springs readily to mind is Arundhati Roy, who wrote in an article on September 29, 2001: “Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.” On......

If our global warming trend continues and dog days of January (yesterday’s high: 72) become the norm, one unanticipated side effect may be the prospect of a year-round stuffy theater season. Those who frequent off-Broadway theater have learned to accept their sticky fate in the summer, but the notion of theatrical sweat lodges through January is sure to separate the men from the boys. Such were my gloomy thoughts as I took my seat in......

It sounds like an open and shut case: A hip London theater company snatched up some funny short stories by Woody Allen and adapted them for the stage, adding live jazz to punch things up. The stories feature a private dick named Kaiser Lupowitz and absurd cases like the search for the missing Almighty and women of the night who’ll talk Proust for a price. Murder Mystery Blues was a hit when it premiered across......

After retrieving your ticket for The Fortune Teller at the HERE Arts Center box office – and I suggest doing that soon – you’ll be instructed to exit the building and head west, following a faded red line along the sidewalk. This leads to a door, which opens onto a staircase, down which you'll descend to a corridor and, finally, the lobby for the dainty theater. It’s a mysterious and fitting beginning to this......

Durango, Julia Cho’s subdued melodrama currently running at The Public Theater, casts a bland eye on the ever-deceptive American Dream, as experienced by one shattered Korean-American family. The story (which could also be subtitled Near-Death of a Salesman) begins with the firing of Boo-Seng Lee (James Saito), the family’s reticent patriarch, after twenty years of thankless service as a non-descript mid-level bean-counter. The termination deals a heavy blow to a man with little left......

Jude Narita’s solo show Walk the Mountain, currently running at Theater for the New City, delves into the horrors endured by women who survived the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge. The text of the play is inspired by interviews Narita conducted with Vietnamese and Cambodian women; throughout the performance she plays a wide variety of roles to create a detailed portrait of human suffering. The centerpiece of the spare set, designed by Jerry Browning,......

When the young Georg Buchner died in 1837, he left behind his unfinished working class tragedy Woyzeck, which was inspired by the real-life story of convicted criminal J.C. Woyzeck, a soldier who had become unemployed, homeless and hallucinatory. Before being sentenced to death for the murder of his lover, the medical examiner dismissed Woyzeck's mental illness as mere social deviancy. Buchner’s play was revolutionary in that it sympathized with the miserable life of a common......

Adam Bock’s The Thugs is a trenchant little study of office eccentricity currently filling in at Soho Rep. I say “little” not just because the play clocks in and out in under an hour, but also because there really isn’t much in the way of dramatic payoff. Temps come and go, bodies pile up on other floors, somebody gets shoved down the stairs, but ultimately the office manager is always there to drive her staff......

It’s fair to assume a certain amount of healthy caution in approaching Dave Eggers’ new oeuvre. It is, after all, coated in a thin outer layer of the meta-tastic postmodernism for which Eggers is (in?)famous. Who else would you expect to produce a novel entitled What Is the What: An Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, A Novel by Dave Eggers? So, that healthy dose of skepticism is well-founded. Eggers’ foray into the book world was......

For anyone who flies out of Newark, this is some distressing news: The Transportation Security Administration conducted 22 security tests at Newark Liberty International Airport, only for the Newark screeners to fail 20 of them. The Star-Ledger noted some of the problems:One of the security officials familiar with last week's tests said screeners at Newark missed fake explosive devices that were hidden under bottles of water in carry-on luggage, taped beneath an agent's clothing and......

Of all the genre-transcending brilliance of John Le Carré’s Cold War novels, perhaps the most impressive was the even, subtle brush with which he painted either side of his idealogical divide. The British Intelligence and Moscow Centre were equal foes – it simply depended on which side of the curtain you found yourself. The Cold War was, undoubtedly, Le Carré’s playing field, and his mastery of it was legendary. And although the world has moved......

As a concept, P.S. 122’s Tower of Babel was immediately intriguing to me: the event was described as a “full-immersion theater experience” in which audiences of 25 would be tucked into bed and told stories in foreign tongues by 25 different storytellers. There would be tea, groovy music and far-out video projections. But when the night of the performance came I got cold feet. As if anybody needed reminding, the local media outlets had......

I consider myself a pretty seasoned reader. I can find things amusing, or witty, or well-written, and basically keep it to myself until I’m ready to review the book. But much to my husband’s chagrin, Mark Haddon has bested me. While reading most his second novel, A Spot of Bother, in one sitting, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at every other page, and having laughed, I couldn’t stop myself from reading aloud all the......

Don’t be alarmed by the synthesized arena-rock Muzak piped into the house before “Esoterica”, Eric Walton’s solo show of magic and mentalism. “Arrested Development” fans may get the feeling they’re in for a long night of cheesy, Gobian gimmickry, but any similarities begin and end with the tacky taste in music - a trait mysteriously shared by virtually all magicians. The main appeal of “Esoterica” is Walton’s extraordinary sleight-of-hand and card trickery, which grow dramatically......

“Never Swim Alone” is a swift, funny satire about two Alpha-males and their ruthless competition for the title of Top Dog. The play is structured as a surreal egotistic boxing match: Frank and Bill, two guys in dark suits and bad ties, square off in a 13 round Battle Royale of vicious undermining and one-upmanship. It is at first unclear why these guys are at odds; they have so much in common that they often......

It shouldn't be a shock to anyone to hear that an executive at Starbucks has a better work environment than a lowly barista. Other than higher pay and a far sweeter benies package, Gothamist imagines the Starbucks executive enjoys a quiter, less asshole-ridden workday (maybe). While to hear that there is a 2-class system for nursing moms on the job there is not surprising, it is still disturbing. Whereas the executive has a comfy and......

Today in the Fringe Festival 89 of the 200+ shows for 2006 are on view. There is most assuredly something for everyone – just have a look at the listings. And here are five more reviews (see also seven from last weekend and four from yesterday), of Suicide, the Musical, Fatboy Romeo, The Yellow Wallpaper, Their Wings Were Blue, and Armageddon Dance Party, the last of which is going straight to the top tier of......

The productions covered in this installment of reviews from the 2006 New York Fringe Festival http://www.fringenyc.org are pretty far removed from those in last week’s dispatch -- which is just as it should be, since the Fringe is all about the new, the different, the craziness from every direction of the compass and layer of the mind. Plus, in today’s selection there are two can’t-misses: Big Doolie, by Richard Thompson, and David Isaacson’s Letter Purloined.......

Reviewing shows in the very first days of the Fringe Festival is always a little hazardous, what with so many kinks that need to be worked out (if not in the show itself, in the Fringe management). But we wanted to report to you early on about what to see and what not to see, overlooking glitches as best we could, at least as far as they appeared to be early-run problems rather than real......