Like his breakthrough 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ A Lovely Sunday for Creve Couer (1979) is set in a humble St. Louis apartment in the 1930s. It’s another of the many late-career titles that failed to revive Williams’ faded car …Read more
Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come (now at the Mint Theater Company) was not a success when it premiered in New York in 1936. In fact, this second play of the Hellman canon (after The Children’s Hour) was a full-tilt disaster. The three-act drama (played …Read more
If you’re a celebrity actor, the world can easily learn about your life and career. You probably have your own website—and there may even be a fan-site or two out there devoted to you. If you’re a star of the highest magnitude, biographers may have w …Read more
My Life on a Diet, starring Renée Taylor (now at the Theatre at St. Clement’s), is also the name of a book by Taylor, published in 1986. The stage version has been around for a while too. Her husband and writing partner Joseph Bologna, who passed awa …Read more
The plot of the 1965 Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever centers on reincarnation. A kooky young New Yorker, Daisy Gamble, visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Bruckner, for help in kicking her smoking habit. Under hypnosis, she reveals a …Read more
It seems sometimes that every other entertainer working these days has a Trump impersonation at the ready, though many seem to miss the mark by a mile. I’ve never been especially enthused about either Alec Baldwin’s blustery turn on Saturday Night Li …Read more
Robert Patrick’s Judas comes to us from 1973, the same year in which his most famous drama, Kennedy’s Children, was first produced. Judas is a sort of modern-dress passion play—it traces Biblical events from the death of John the Baptist up to the cr …Read more
In Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, a man named John Marcher fails to connect with a woman who cares for him. Marcher has a premonition that something horrible will befall him in life, and when that “beast in the jungle” inevitably …Read more
There’s been some well-intentioned talk in the last couple of years about how artists might help bridge the chasm between red states and blue, or—maybe even trickier—the gap between red and blue factions within a single community. So far, the talk se …Read more
At a hasty first glance, Alexander V. Thompson’s Pete Rex—staged by The Dreamscape Theatre, in a New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters—may seem a piece of comic whimsy about a world in which dinosaurs once again roam the earth. Soon, though, the play e …Read more