For a one-woman performance, Women on the Verge owes a great deal to a cooperative effort, and it is to the credit of all concerned that Faith Collins’s time on stage is nothing less than captivating. That she performs a genuinely stunning piece of w …Read more

David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones took the Tony for Best Play in 1972. It also – and I remember it well – shook up New York theater like a 5 on the Richter scale. Nothing before had so slammed together ideas of classic Americana and the broken jetsam of …Read more

A few thousand years later, not a whole lot surpasses the Oresteia of Aeschylus in terms of good old-fashioned family dysfunction on an epic scale. The myriad conflicts of the House of Atreus do not ever die, the bloody ends of its primary members as …Read more

It might be over-the-top to call Omar Sangare a “man with a mission”, but as founder and Artistic Director of the United Solo Theatre Festival, he has certainly spent a good deal of time, energy, and passion in promoting the one-person show in its ma …Read more

Melissa Ritz, who would have been described years ago as a leggy blonde, is a woman on a quest. In brief, she abandoned a long and profitable career as a cocktail server in Vegas for the New York theater scene, and New York is none the worse for it. …Read more

You begin to understand that you are not entirely safe as a theater-goer before you even take your seat for Going Once! Laughing Twice!!  In lowbrow tux and sneakers, Brian Jaffe – who authored the play – barrels through the crowd to bully the poor b …Read more

Having seen Ira Lewis’s Chinese Coffee nearly 24 hours ago, I remain catatonic in regard to relating the evening: there is simply too much to say. This is the kind of excellent two-character drama in which a galaxy of possibilities erupts every few m …Read more

When I sat down the other day with Steven Gallagher, I made up my mind to be a doofus. (Yes, sometimes it is a choice.) More exactly, I determined to ask the obvious, and from the get-go: just how much of his extraordinary Stealing Sam is autobiograp …Read more

Christopher Vened’s Human Identity, a one-man show at Theatre Row and part of the United Solo Festival’s hundreds of offerings through November, is not exactly theater, although it is true to the one-man show status. Vened makes it clear from the sta …Read more

It is not easy to pull off a one-man show, ever. It is less easy to do this when the show is a personal history because these things so, so frequently become funky sermons or demands for attention to experiences not necessarily riveting to anyone but …Read more