to kill
The first red flag of Live Source’s “Bohemian Lights” (currently at HERE Arts Center) came during the curtain speech. The audience was informed of the cultural significance of the show they were about to see, as if to preemptively warn us we’re imbeciles unable to fathom the genius about to ensue. The play, adapted from the Ramón del Valle-Inclán script…
What Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” did for the complacency of the 1960s, Walter Mosley’s “Lift” attempts to do for the beginning of the twenty-first century. These important plays collectively challenge the racial, cultural and class consciousness of the American landscape. “Lift” uses the trope, here an extended metaphor, of the…
Trope after trope thrusts Jessica Dickey’s “Row After Row” into a kaleidoscope of images present and past celebrating humankind’s insistence on moving forward through often seemingly insurmountable “battles” on an off the theatres of war. Currently running at New York City Stage II, “Row After Row” is part of the Women’s Project Theater’s thirty-sixth season of presenting plays written by…
“When rain has hung the leaves with tears/I want you near to kill my fears, / To help me to leave all my blues behind. / Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.” – Donovan Billed as the confrontation of the inexorable mystery of fate by two friends spending a day boating, Jon Fosse’s “I Am…
Co-dependent sisters Ada (Katya Campbell) and Sam (Keira Keeley) and their alter-ego sidekick Dorrie (Jen Ponton) suffer from a somewhat classic case of disambiguation and their individual and corporate arrested development occupy the stage in Helley Feiffer’s complex and often disturbing “How to Make Friends and then Kill Them” currently running at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Ms. Feiffer’s new play…