Primary Stages current offering is Theresa Rebeck’s new play entitled “Dig.” Now playing at 59E59 theatres, the play revolves around the situations that develop in a small plant shop that has its name “dig” stenciled on the glass window of the front door. The playwright takes every possible opportunity to utilize a plant or horticultural metaphor to translate or foreshadow…
Theatergoers who missed the successful Broadway production of “Kinky Boots” should make their way to Stage 42 for the Off-Broadway revival which will be sure to please. A more condensed version of the original does not compromise the structure or diminish any of the crucial themes of the story. It is actually quite a different experience because of the intimacy…
Promising a touching love story following a one-nightstand encounter in Amsterdam, Clarence Coo’s “On That Day in Amsterdam” (currently on at 59E59 Theaters) delivers instead a convoluted story of risk, disenfranchisement, immigration policy, art history, and duplicity that has little to do with the narrative’s main characters. This is unfortunate given the actors are outstanding, the direction first-rate, and the…
Given the long-term relationship that existed between A.R. Gurney and Primary Stages, it is befitting that the prolific playwright requested his agent to send his newest one act play “Final Follies” to the theater company for production in 2017. It turned out to be ominously and aptly titled since he passed soon after, leaving this to be the last play…
In two thirty-five-minute acts, playwright James Inverne attempts to convince the audience that “music helped Israel find its cultural identity during its formative years.” In the first short act that takes place in 1926, Yehuda Sharett (Yuval Boim), a “kibbutznik from the Ukraine” and advocate for a Jewish homeland, takes a walk with Jascha Heifetz (Adam Green) and engages the…
Kate Hamill has done it again. The ‘it’ in question, is her remarkable ability to adapt Jane Austen’s iconic novels for the stage. Her adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” had a successful Off-Broadway run of over two-hundred and sixty-five performances. Her current adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” which is playing at Primary Stages at Cherry Lane Theatre should enjoy the…
Members of the Primary Stages staff, prior to curtain, passed through the audience asking members to “select a button” based on who we thought would “win” the discordant discourse: Jefferson, Dickens, or Tolstoy – the three characters appearing in Scott Carters “Discord” currently running at Primary Stages. Further instructions included the option to change one’s mind after the play and…
“The thing was, I was really good at it. And I loved it. I just loved being able to . . . I don’t know . . . make someone more comfortable. Make some of their pain go away. And it wasn’t just because it was someone I loved. It was . . . the fact that I was in…
For a brief time in Tanya Saracho’s “Fade,” currently playing at Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the lines between class and status fade as Mexican-born script writer Lucia (Annie Dow) and American-born Chicano custodian Abel (Eddie Martinez) seem to drop their guards and allow their “similarities” to overshadow their “differences.” Abel “forgives” Lucia for her assumptions when he…
If the idiom “home is where the heart is” has any veracity, then the characters in Horton Foote’s 1982 “The Roads to Home” are as far from home as anyone might be. Geographically, the main characters – the three women in the first two short plays of the somewhat interconnected trilogy – are refugees from their original homes and have…