“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…
“Witnessed by the World” at 59E59 Theater B (Through December 15) Written by Ronnie Cohen and Jane Beale Directed by Karen Carpenter Reviewed by David Roberts Theatre Reviews Limited With thousands of books published about John F. Kennedy, including tomes promulgating a variety of assassination conspiracy theories, it would seem risky to write a script about the events surrounding yet…
“The LORD upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down.” Psalm 145:14 (NIV) During her belabored round trip from her home to the train station to pick up her husband Mr. Rooney (Michael Gambon) on his birthday, Mrs. Rooney (Eileen Atkins) rehearses the variety of her physical and emotional deficits: there is much that has “bowed…
One cannot pay off the past. Unless it is confronted and dealt with, it just keeps impacting the present and future. Although Donald Margulies’ “The Model Apartment” seems to deal solely with the detritus of Holocaust fallout, the play is about far more and warrants the current Primary Stages revival of this 1995 OBIE Award winning play at 59E59 Theaters….
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer; /Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, /The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” – William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919) All the…
“It is time to enjoy happiness with those we love and to realize that we are at a time in our lives when enjoying today means more than worrying about tomorrow. It is time to celebrate the fact that we have finally learned what life is about and how to make the most of it.” (An Excerpt from When All…
“Wake, awake, for night is flying,”/The watchmen on the heights are crying;/”Awake, Jerusalem, arise!” (By Philipp Nicolai, 1556-1608, translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1829-1878) Despite the watchmen’s recurrent and plaintive admonition to join the ranks of the awake, humankind has doggedly chosen to consort with the perhaps less discomfiting echelons of the asleep, the unconscious, or perhaps even the lifeless. Ken…
“Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that…
The short description of “Safe” provided by the producers indicates that Penny Jackson’s play is about Nina, “an affluent prep school girl from the East [who] meets a dangerous man” and raises the question whether Nina “will be safe.” The wonderful thing about Ms. Jackson’s play is that the audience is never quite sure whether the dangerous man is suspected…
Storm the Prison for Wretched Lesbians! Free the Lezzers from the Jodi Foster Wing! So chants the well-meaning straight Nair-do-well Jean Jackman (Anthony Wemyss) as he rallies the “troops” to free imprisoned lesbians who, twenty years since the start of the French Revolution, still do not have civil rights. Surely the man who helped bring down the oppressive absolute monarchy…