Photo © Gabe Evans Edward Albee, who turned 80 last month, has been enjoying a well-deserved center stage spotlight since last fall, when Second Stage produced a vital revival of The Zoo Story, which was coupled with a newly penned prelude called Homelife. A new play, Me, Myself and I, was well received in Princeton last January, while The Occupant, another new work, will premiere next month. Now two of Albee’s earliest exercises, the interconnected......

It’s not Tracy Letts’s fault that his play, August: Osage County, has been breathlessly overhyped by the critics, from the Times’s Charles Isherwood on down. It’s also not his fault that compared to many other Broadway spectacles the play stands out as a polestar of humor and intelligence. Still, it’s difficult to disassociate the play from the deafening buzz; August: Osage County is being heralded as an Important Theatrical Event, when it’s really just a......

Edward Albee’s 1958 play The Zoo Story was a watershed moment in American theater, despite being ignored for two years by New York producers. Though the riveting two character play marked the arrival of a significant new American voice, it first premiered in Germany; not until 1960 was The Zoo Story performed in the U.S, and then not even in New York, where it’s set. Albee’s breakthrough one-act concerns a random, ultimately violent encounter between......

EVENT: Tonight Duncan Sheik (ah, we still remember when he sang "Barely Breathing" at the Peach Pit After Dark) and Steven Sater pair up for a Spring Awakening book signing. They will be joined from 5–5:30pm by Spring Awakening cast members Jennifer Damiano and John Gallagher, Jr., who will perform acoustic versions of two song selections from the show at the signing. 5 to 7pm // Drama Book Shop [250 W 40th St] // Free......

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......

Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells counts 12 films about America’s entanglements in the Middle East coming down the pipe this year. It’ll be some feat if even one of them matches the urgency, power and electricity of Iphigenia 2.0, Charle’s Mee’s self-described “sampling” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. You may know the essential storyline: Agamemnon’s army is left stranded en route to the Trojan War when the goddess Artemis stifles the wind to punish him for......

Every show biz impresario knows that the best way to get to Broadway is not by waiting for Guffman but by stirring up a little controversy. Though it seems unlikely that’s what Connecticut high school students intended while developing a play about the Iraq quagmire, controversy is what they got when Principal Skinner Canty cancelled their little performance. After the ensuing uproar, which included public outcries from such heavyweights as Edward Albee and Christopher Durang,......

Voyage, Tom Stoppard’s first installment in the three play Coast of Utopia series, crowned a month of breathless Times hype with a gushing Brantley rave. But good old Tommy “Can’t Stop; Won’t” Stoppard – famous for his perfectionism – still ain't satisfied. According to Michael Riedel, Stoppard has been staking out Lincoln Center during intermission and confronting any audience member with the temerity to jump ship during the (nearly) three hour tour. According to Riedel,......

Bill Irwin, Actor...