“This play is hard to watch as a socialist.” Said the young man sitting next to me at Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band: a play about the Khmer Rouge regime. That performance seems ages ago now; it was the last I saw before the theatre shutdown. But I …Read more

It may sound like a grisly horror fest, but Kevin Augustine’s dance/puppet show Body Concert, performed as part of La MaMa’s Puppet Festival, is actually a gentle meditation on the human body, the interconnectedness of our separate parts, and the int …Read more

For whatever reason, there seems to be an upsurge in absurdist theatre lately. Maybe it’s because the last two years felt like a badly scripted Beckett play. At any rate, the newest is Randy Sharp’s Worlds Fair Inn, presented by Axis Theatre Company. …Read more

Sherlock Holmes may be one of the most popular characters of all time, but Arthur Conan Doyle had a love-hate relationship with the behemoth he created. Tired of his public’s unending demand for stories about the great detective, Conan Doyle tried to …Read more

“Do you remember those things we used to go to? They were in expensive a** buildings? What were they called?” Ngozi Anyanwu’s new play The Last of the Love Letters, directed by Patricia McGregor at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, is a …Read more

A struggling amusement park, a tight-fisted boss, and four beaten-down employees. That’s where Alexander Perez’s dark comedy Randy’s Dandy Coaster Castle begins, and while the premise may not sound like a lot of fun, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. Dire …Read more

John Patrick Shanley is legendary, so it’s no surprise that his new one-act plays (billed as “five short digressions”), premiering at the Brooklyn Navy Yards by the Bridge Production Group, make for a night of laugh-out-loud, razor-sharp comedy. (I A …Read more

At this point, countless musicals (some good, some not so good) have been written on just about every topic under the sun. But a musical about two people writing a musical? Now playwrights are just scraping the bottom of the barrel. Or so it would se …Read more

Absurdism is a tricky genre: tricky to write and tricky to perform. That’s what makes Edward Einhorn’s absurdist science fiction drama Alma Baya so impressive: it’s nearly perfect. Two women named Alma and Baya live inside a pod on an air-less planet …Read more

“I have lived through plague and famine and drought, and there is a stopclock up here that is making me more nervous and sweatier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” Such is the sassy signature wit we’ve come to love – and expect – from theatrica …Read more