“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.” ― Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”…
“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.” (W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming’) In Terry Johnson’s “Insignificance,” currently running in Room 505 at “Langham Place” in New York City (the first staging…
No matter how diligently humankind attempts to “reap angels,” the presumed effects of “The Fall” not only carry forward into the present but subvert any attempt for a successful journey “on to perfection” (John Wesley). “Angel Reapers” – currently running at the Pershing Square Signature Center – is a theological and psychological tour de force that exposes the underbelly of…
“Here’s to the chaos/The heartache and strain/Three cheers for agony/A toast to the pain/Hats off to everything that leaves a scar/For reminding me who my friends are” (“The Reminder Song” by Shaina Taub) “Old Hats,” the captivating theater piece created and performed by Bill Irwin and David Shiner, is back at the Signature Theater after a sold out successful run…
“Into each life some rain must fall/But too much is falling in mine/Into each heart some tears must fall/ But some day the sun will shine.” (Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots) “But into every life a little rain must fall.” (Queen) That unwelcome “rain” falls unexpectedly into the lives of the characters of Mark Gerrard’s scintillating new play in…
“I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,/I saw a white ladder all covered with water,/I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,/I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children, And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”…
Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Spoils,” currently running at the New Group, is the “This Is Our Youth” for the twenty-first century millennial generation and captures the angst of this generation with gripping honesty and often disturbing realism. The complicated dynamics between the protagonist Ben (Jesse Eisenberg), his Nepalese roommate Kalyan (played with a charming innocence by Kunal Nayyar), Kalyan’s girlfriend Reshma…
“But what if I was? What if I was standing in the bathroom with my ear up to the door? What if I heard every word you said, what would you do? How would you feel? Would you be embarrassed?” – Jaclyn When a play asks rich, deep, and enduring questions – truly rich and deep and enduring questions –…
“You would not see. I can’t get beyond these hands. I jam in the fingers. I break on the bone. I am lonely. I mean, oh, no, not exactly lonely, not really. That’s a little strong, actually.” (Ozzie to David) As soon as Rick (Raviv Ullman) enters his family’s house in David Rabe’s “Sticks and Bones,” the audience knows it…