Well, we were all fueled up. A pair of double mint juleps purchased at the theater bar cost fifty-seven dollars, with tip. At least they let us take the souvenir cups to our seats. As the lights went down, my friend grumbled about the evening’s “cocktail rape” and leaned down between the seats. I heard […]

There are two kinds of people in this world, according to the amoral, avaricious Hubbard clan, who headline Lillian Hellman’s sumptuously sour 1939 Southern drama The Little Foxes: the people who devour other people for sport, and the people who stand by and watch them do it. That may be so, but the brilliance of […]

When librettist Michael Stewart adapted Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker into the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, he made one tiny verbal change that’s always struck me as the essence of the American musical. In Wilder’s comedy, Dolly Levi lures the miserly Horace Vandergelder to the Harmonia Gardens by promising to introduce him to a modest girl […]

It takes the warping of time and space to stop white dudes in media from sexually harassing women. At least, that’s how it goes in Groundhog Day, the dutifully clamorous — and often joyously funny — Broadway embiggening of a film whose premise suggests something of the experience of watching this adaptation. As prickish weatherman […]

In her intriguing new comedy, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, playwright Sarah Ruhl demonstrates how a pleasant life can still carry more than a whiff of insufficiency. The life in question belongs to George (Marisa Tomei), a fortysomething New Jersey suburbanite. George has a smart, affectionate husband, Paul (Omar Metwally), two (unseen) children, and […]

Once upon a time last week, I believe I was kidnapped, hoisted onto a flying carpet, and magically transported to Annie Baker’s new play, The Antipodes, at the Signature Center. There I saw eight people sitting around a conference table. Six of them are — or at least, seem to be — writers. The seventh […]

Secular people like to think we’re smarter: We assume we’re more tolerant than the orthodox — any orthodox, of any religion. In Zayd Dohrn’s The Profane, now at Playwrights Horizons in a production directed by Kip Fagan, complacencies like these are challenged, as two Muslim-American families face off in an intimate confrontation. Dohrn’s indictment of […]