Results tagged “play”

It can sometimes spell trouble when an Off-Off Broadway production features cast members of a certain age; seniors willing to perform for peanuts have been known to sink otherwise competent ensembles with an awkward amateurishness. It's hard to say whether Rae C. Wright is in fact an AARP card-carrier—she's in impeccable shape, for one thing—but her appearance in Tina Satter's sort-of-musical Family initially gave me pause. It shouldn't have. Far from scuttling the show into a community theater morass, she electrifies Satter's enjoyably daffy production with an incisive, intelligent humor, portraying the matriarch (Mum) of a once-prominent family in decline.

If Terminator Salvation's bleak vision of humanity's enslavement by machines has you down, HERE Arts Center is the place to go for an antidote to Hollywood blockbuster dystopia. The machines that fill the stage in machines machines machines machines machines machines machines (which we'll henceforth refer to as "machines") are as inextricably involved in day-to-day life as the computer you're using to read this, but they're not about to become "self-aware" any time soon. They're not making existence any easier either, but that's what makes "machines" so damn entertaining: A man pouring a glass of orange juice doesn't make for compelling theater, but three men using an elaborate system of pulleys and counterweights to (somewhat successfully) pour juice makes for daffy, steampunk slapstick.

Most of us associate Our Town with unbearably earnest high school drama club productions, or reruns of that very special "Growing Pains" episode in which Mike and Boner get cast in the play and Mike decides he wants to be a professional actor while wearing a regrettable vest. But Chicago director David Cromer, who won an OBIE for last year's Adding Machine, has come to wrest Thornton Wilder's 1938 play back from the tween stage hogs. His inspired interpretation remains faithful to Wilder's intriguing blend of naturalism and formal deconstruction, while also eschewing the hokey, Norman Rockwell sentimentality that's de rigueur for amateur productions.

The National Theater of the United States of America [NTUSA] is not an official, federally-sanctioned performance troupe, but that's a trivial detail. This mischievous gang of innovators represents some of the best attributes of downtown "experimental" theater, and in the eight or nine years since their first production—a neo-vaudevillian romp staged in the tiny basement of a Times Square deli—they've come to earn their tongue-in-cheek title. That Obama's stimulus package doesn't allocate more financing for their endeavors is an outrage!

In the century and change since Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered, the play's feminist denunciation of male-dominated domesticity has gone from radical to rather quaint. But leave it to pioneering avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines to blow the dust of the classic with their ingeniously staged production, in which all male characters are played by actors whose heights range from 40 to 53 inches, and the women by actors almost six feet tall.

Ariana Reines's play Telephone begins in darkness, with the faint but mesmerizing sound of static, finally interrupted by the famous words, "Watson, come here, I want you!" Then, out of the void, burst our two stars, Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas Watson (Matthew Dellapina), their faces frozen in a tableaux of cartoonish terror. In the highly stylized, presentational comic patter that ensues, staged in front of Vaudevillian footlights, it becomes clear their intention is not so much to sell us on their miraculous invention as it is to figure out what the hell just happened. The first transmission of a human voice has left them rather disoriented, you see, as if they've been teleported to another dimension.

Reclusive portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer (1917-1956) believed he was a foundling dropped on his parents' property by a tornado, and as an adult he legally changed his name from Meyer to Disfarmer to disassociate himself from his small-town Arkansas milieu. ("Meier" is a German word for dairy farmer; adding the prefix "dis" was intended to establish what he was not.) Using glass plate photography long after it was obsolete, Disfarmer's work spans the Dust Bowl days to the post-War era. Unrecognized until years after his death, in the 1970s thousands of his negatives were purchased and publicized by an editor at The Arkansas Sun, and the portraits were eventually acclaimed for their arresting clarity and revealing simplicity.

Anybody who grew up shuttling back and forth between divorced parents will be all too familiar with the stifling setting of Sixty Miles to Silver Lake: the interior of a car, inhabited only by a single dad and his soccer-playing son, who have no choice but to interact with each other on the long slog between the boy's mother's house and the father's depressing apartment. If that sounds like your idea of a fun road trip, then you'll love Dan LeFranc's play, which takes place entirely within the confines of a Volvo stationwagon, driven by a miserable father named Ky, with his petulant son Denny riding shotgun.

Young Jean Lee's plays have been instant Off Broadway hits for their personal, probing, and typically hilarious explorations of race and religion in an ostensibly "post-racial" America. Her newest work, The Shipment, features an extremely talented all-black ensemble in a genre-defying show that looks at how African Americans are perceived and portrayed in mass media. As entertaining as it is thought provoking, it's also the best 15 bucks you can spend on theater in New York City at the moment.

Over a dozen Broadway musicals and plays will close this month, and Charles Isherwood at the Times is getting a little verklempt about it. The number of productions bowing out amounts to almost half the total number of shows currently on Broadway! According to Crain's, box office grosses increased during the holiday season, but were still 10.6% less than the same time period in 2007.

          

Read our Passing Strange review, our interview with Stew, and click on the other images for the Gothamist top ten of '08.

Park Slopers Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, dubbed New York’s hippest stay-at-home parents by the Times, have joined the cast of Classic Stage Company's Uncle Vanya, to be directed by Austin Pendleton for a January opening. It's the second Chekhov play in a row for Sarsgaard, who's currently on Broadway in an excellent production of The Seagull, and the first time the couple have worked together, aside from a short film. In other stage news, Liza Minelli canceled last night's performance of her new one-woman Broadway show because she was "suffering from dehydration." Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty will come to Broadway after all, but it's unclear whether Alison Pill will reprise her much buzzed-about role. And one performance of Will Ferrell's hotly anticipated Broadway show, You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush, will be simulcast on HBO.

If Joseph Campbell ever got really baked and told his grandchildren a meandering bedtime story, it might have sounded something like The Granduncle Quadrilogy, a whimsical four part fairytale "from the Land of Ice," presented by Piper McKenzie at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg. Playwright Jeff Lewoncyzk's idiosyncratic fable centers on a bungling hero, the titular Granduncle, and his kooky misadventures in an imaginary arctic land where war is everlasting and it's so damn cold everyone looks forward to death, when they can finally join their messiah in heaven. (Which is under the ice.)

We could waste this introduction telling you how consistently funny Mike Birbiglia's new solo show Sleepwalk With Me is, but why not just let the man's comedy stylings speak for themselves? Here's a totally unrelated Birbiglia riff on our 43rd President: "I think Bush seems like that fun guy. You know, that guy you invite to the barbecue because you know he'll start the whiffle ball game. He's like Whiffle Ball Tony! You're like, 'Yeah, Whiffle Ball Tony's here! Alright, alright. This is cool.'

The Debate Society, arguably New York's most charming theater company, is adept at seducing their audience with the atmosphere of whatever locale they choose to evoke. Their latest work, called Cape Disappointment, meticulously conjures up Gothic worlds of lost highways, traveling salesmen, Eisenhower-era teens, and roadside bandits. Designer Karl Allen has done excellent work transforming the upstairs theater at P.S. 122 into a romantically decayed drive-in movie, even installing vintage speaker boxes throughout the audience. And to complete the scene, free bags of popcorn are distributed—noisy, crinkly bags that maddeningly break the spell just like at the cinema.

One of the most-talked about productions of this theater season has been Sarah Kane's Blasted at the indispensable Soho Rep. First presented in 1995 at the Royal Court in London, Kane's debut sparked enormous controversy for its unblinking depiction of brutality between the three characters: a bigoted, middle-aged English journalist, his unwilling young paramour, and a wild-eyed soldier who crashes into their hotel room to bring the savagery to new heights.

Scandal-mongering reporter Augustine Early is an opportunistic parasite who'll do whatever it takes to get the scoop on a front page story—even if it means manufacturing the story himself. He's amoral, vindictive, and seemingly devoid of compassion. He's also, as it happens, a lot of fun to spend a couple hours with. In Ronan Noone's briskly entertaining one-man play The Atheist, the charismatic Campbell Scott brings a rakish charm and incisive wit to a role that, in the wrong hands, might have been simply repellent.

"Now your eyes are feeling heavy. You want to sleep, don't you?" That's the question posed by child psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Richard Griffiths) as he hypnotizes his 17-year-old patient Alan Strang (Daniel Radcliffe) in the current revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus. But in that moment I could have sworn Griffiths was speaking directly to me. It was also the only point where I felt that any of the performers in this tedious, overwrought production were actually in the same room as the audience.

Note to self: When heading off into the woods with a group of rifle-toting friends from childhood, leave stuff like politics and infidelity off the list of discussion topics. In Craig Wright's modest one-act Lady, the voluble and disgruntled Dyson (Paul Sparks) just can't keep the conversation light. A passionate liberal college teacher in small-town Illinois, Dyson blames his old friend Graham (David Wilson Barnes), a congressman, for inspiring his 18-year-old son to join the marines. Kenny (Michael Shannon), the third amigo, is the ineffectual stoner peacemaker caught in the crossfire with his dog, the titular Lady.

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.)

Just like today's gang of socially conservative zealots, late 19th century temperance crusader Carrie A. Nation had an unshakable conviction that she was on a mission from God to purge America of vice. She'd no doubt be appalled to know that her life's work has been appropriated by the outre transgressors in Radiohole—Brooklyn's fearlessly debauched four-person theater collective—for use in their latest provocation, which also takes visual inspiration from avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whose oeuvre includes such titles as Lucifer Rising.

With minimal props (a quill pen, a gas mask), rich sound design, and vivid video projection, Michael McQuilken's one man show, A Day in Dig Nation, sets out to be a dystopian exploration of our "media-drenched" post-modern phantasmagoria, as seen through the giant eyes of Rex, an isolated office drone kept complacent by video games and television. Then the apocalypse happens, and Rex survives in a bunker for 26 years until he finally hears a woman's voice calling for survivors over the ham radio. But she sounds kind of demanding, and rather than respond he goes back to working on his robot.

Scarlett Johansson may have portrayed an UES nanny in The Nanny Diaries, but Lisa Ramirez is bringing her real-deal Brooklyn nanny experiences to the stage. Her one-woman show called "Exit Cuckoo" will give a "glimpse into the world of alcohol-soaked mommies and hardworking caregivers," The Daily News reports. The 90-minute show is playing at the Midtown International Theater Festival, and Ramirez says it isn't a sensationalized account, like the aforementioned film, but rather a way to give the "invisible women" a voice. Let's hope they worked Tea Lounge (R.I.P.) into the set design!

Wow, this show is bizarre. But bizarre in a way that carries on P.S. 122’s scintillating legacy as a downtown refuge for freaky, outré performance art. Musician/performer Neal Medlyn’s latest rock "tragic-comedy," Unpronounceable Symbol, pays musical homage to Prince, with a live band led by Kiki & Herb’s Kenny Mellman, who co-wrote the show and rearranged a bunch of Prince B-sides for the score.

If you’ve ever watched acting so bad it made you want to shove the performer offstage and play the role yourself, Suspicious Package is for you. The creators of this clever little production have spared themselves the headache of dealing with actors by casting the audience and turning them loose on the streets of Williamsburg. It happens for just four people at a time, and when you buy your ticket online you cast yourself in one of the roles, choosing either the producer, the showgirl, the heiress, or the private detective.

It’s hard to imagine a production of Macbeth with more sound and fury than the outré adaptation currently battering audiences on the Brooklyn waterfront in DUMBO. Two parts Shakespeare and one part Ridley Scott, this visionary spectacle is the work of Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna and the TR Warszawa theater company; it’s being staged outdoors in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with a cast of 32 actors on a 36-foot-high set built specifically for the production.

Hollywood, 1940. As Hitler devours Europe and America inches toward war, a remarkable technology that could prove invaluable to the U.S. Navy is invented by… a sexy movie star and an avant garde composer? Though it sounds more than a little far-fetched, it’s actually a true story, and the subject of Elyse Singer’s multimedia play Frequency Hopping.

Do you enjoy ingeniously crafted rock tunes, with brilliant lyrics and arrangements for accordion, keyboard, ukulele, guitar, bass and drums? Do you like pirates? How about puppets? Rum based drink specials? Laughing until your sides hurt? If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you’re ready to set forth on the dread ship Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, the rollicking “pirate puppet rock odyssey” that’s currently docked at Ars Nova.

Mike Bartlett’s modest drama Artefacts, in town as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, peers into the abyss of post-war Iraq society through the eyes of the aptly named Kelly, an indifferent English teenager played with nervy brio by Lizzy Watts. Kelly’s ordinary life with her single mom (Karen Ascoe) is upended by the sudden appearance of the father she never knew, an erudite Iraqi named Ibrahim (Peter Polycarpou) who runs the National Museum of Baghdad. Ibrahim has just an absurd ten minutes to introduce himself before catching a flight back to his war-torn home, but the eventful encounter climaxes when Kelly callously smashes his reconciliation gift: a priceless Mesopotamian vase he “borrowed” from the museum.

All My Sons, Arthur Miller’s tragedy about wartime profiteering, will be coming to an undetermined theater on Broadway at an unspecified date this fall. But nothing generates more buzz than when a Hollywood celebrity joins the cast – in this case that boldfaced name is Katie Holmes, who will try to inject a little integrity into her career by performing live onstage, just out of reach of her Scientology "chaperone."