White America’s pathological fear of black male bodies — a fear that fuels violence with horrible regularity these days — is as old as the institution of slavery, a legacy made palpably present by Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, now at New York Theatre Workshop in a production directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. The […]

You probably remember the story: Boy meets girl; girl gets kidnapped by the god of the underworld; boy sings his way into hell and tries to rescue her. Coming home, Orpheus violates Hades’ single rule — no looking back to make sure Eurydice’s really there — and loses her to the underworld forever. But the […]

Let’s start here: Jukebox musicals can be delightful. Fans celebrating legendary musicians, new choreographies set to old rhythms, strange stories told with familiar lyrics. Unfortunately, Lazarus, a new musical by the surprising collaborative trio of David Bowie, playwright Enda Walsh, and director Ivo van Hove, now playing at New York Theatre Workshop, is not this […]

[pullquote]Coherent it ain’t. But then, Kempson doesn’t aim to bring order to the stage.[/pullquote] For more than twenty years, the downtown theater ensemble known as Elevator Repair Service has staged entire novels by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. They’ve riffed on Greek tragedies. They’ve enacted hilariously arcane legal transcripts. But until now, director John Collins and […]