Results tagged “adambock”

If you’ve ever spent a day working in an office, you'll immediately recognize Beverly Wilkins, the titular character in The Receptionist, Adam Bock's darkly comic study of corporate culture in the age of Cheney. Beverly, played here with spellbinding hilarity by Jayne Houdyshell, is the polite but potentially nasty gatekeeper for the "Northeast office" who, when she's not gossiping with friends and her coworker Lorraine (Kendra Kassenbaum), puts callers through to her boss's (Robert...

Start sharpening your spurs, gays and gals, because Jake Gyllenhaal is coming to Broadway! If director Mike Nichols has his way, you’ll soon have your chance to stalk the sensitive heartthrob as he flees through the stage door of Farragut North, a new play about presidential campaign hardball penned by a former Howard Dean staffer. According to today’s Post, Gyllenhaal (who made his stage debut in a Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed production of Cats in their parents’ living room) is all-but-confirmed for the cast. But before that, Nichols will shepherd other boldface names to Broadway with a spring revival of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl, about a washed up wino actor and his beleaguered wife. With Morgan Freeman and our personal favorite Frances McDormand rumored to play the couple, this has Compelling Theatrical Event written all over it.

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 back to the status quo of their menial tasks. And then it's time to go home.

EVENT: Tonight PowerHouse books is having a signing event for the release of photographer Ron Galella's "Disco Years". This visual diary of the New York club scene in the 70's and 80's is sure to make you nostalgic for Studio 54 - even if that was before your time.

Several times during Swimming in the Shallows, the new play by Adam Bock, a window on a big closet-like structure lifts to reveal that it is an aquarium in which a large shark is swimming. Well, actually it’s not so much an aquarium as a large box with angled mirrors, and the shark isn’t a shark so much as it (he) is Logan Marshall-Green with a fin strapped to his back, and he’s not swimming so much as he is scooting along with his stomach on a skateboard. In any case, he keeps slamming into the glass walls that enclose him, and this seems as apt a metaphor as any for the emotional struggles faced by the characters in this moderately appealing show – that most people face at some point, really. You’re gliding along, intoning something along the lines of “swim...swim...swim” and then all of a sudden, wham! And you can’t even see what you hit properly in order to understand it.