Results tagged “newyorktheaterworkshop”

In his hugely influential book The Empty Space, universally well-regarded director Peter Brook writes, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged." Brook's aesthetic has gone through many permutations since he first burst onto the scene in the '60s with his rigorous and radical interpretations of such plays as Marat/Sade, but his defining characteristic has always been his passion for stripping away excesses to get to the essential.

Playwright Michael Weller, who made his big theatrical debut in 1972 with a play about America's convulsions during Vietnam, is again dramatizing our deeply dysfunctional national psyche during yet another catastrophic war. His new play Beast is described by Weller as "a fever dream in six parts." And while some of those parts are definitely less compelling than others, Weller's "fever dream" is staged vividly here by director Jo Bonney. It's also brutally funny, in the tradition of other dark, absurd war stories like Full Metal Jacket. (If you're going to see it and hate spoilers, here's where you'll want to stop reading.)

The set for director Ivo van Hove’s sensational but frustrating production of Molière's The Misanthrope tingles with exquisite cleanliness – though not for long. As the play beings, we gaze into a sleek shiny box that’s nondescript but not devoid of style: it seems just a few minimalist furnishings away from a feature in the Times’s Home & Garden section. The VIPs who chatter, prevaricate and flatter their way through the room are the curdled cream of contemporary cosmopolitan society; dressed in requisite black with blithely bare feet, they keep one eye and ear perpetually trained on their laptops, Blackberrys, iMacs and cellphones. It’s refreshing to see these pervasive mannerisms of the elite wired world so lucidly skewered onstage, where one can’t really be important unless one is seen chatting with somebody somewhere else.

John Fugelsang starts his one-man show, All the Wrong Reasons: A True Story of Neo-Nazis, Drug Smuggling, and Undying Love, by acknowledging that he isn’t performing a “proper piece of solo theatre. The stories here are not brave, the stakes are very low, my arc is flimsy at best, I’m not a heroic character; I don’t come out of the closet, go to Iraq or kick drugs; and the only time I mention Palestine is in this sentence.” Like everything else in All the Wrong Reasons, his disclaimer’s funny because it’s true. Although the autobiography that Fugelsang unfolds seems out of place in New York Theater Workshop’s voluminous space, it manages to stay aloft on the strength of his self-deprecating wit and warm personality.

THEATER: John Fugelsang, the son of an ex-nun and a former monk, declares war on right-wing evildoers in his one man comedy All the Wrong Reasons. Targets include sex, politics, Klansmen, stem cells and the drug war (which Fugelsang recently skewered on the Huffington Post.) Theater blogger What’s Good/What Blows raves: “…once he settles in to tell the story of trying to get through Orlando airport with an 1/8th of weed in his sock and another 1/8th in his girlfriend's bra, you're pretty much on the edge of your seat till the end. He even throws in some touching realizations. This is a great evening to take a date to.” - John Del Signore

The Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet is making its hotly anticipated state-side debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse, following performances in Paris, Barcelona and Berlin. The company has previously tossed Chekhov, O’Neill, and Miller into their deconstructive blender; this is their first Shakespearean scramble.

We were stoked to read in Playbill that Academy Award-winning actress Holly Hunter (.