Contributing Writer
JUAN FRANCISCO VILLA, DANIEL K. ISAAC photos by Maria Baranova By Ron Cohen In November 1944, William Inge, then a culture reporter and critic for a St. Louis newspaper, invited an emerging St. Louis-bred playwright by the name of Tennessee Williams to his apartment for an interview. The reason for the interview: Williams’ new…
Photos by Joan Marcus Light Shining in Buckinghamshire By Ron Cohen In Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, we’re taken back to England in the middle of the 17th Century. It’s a country torn with strife, civil war is afoot, another war is in the making (this one against Ireland); long-term…
Matthew Broderick Photos by Carol Rosegg By Ron Cohen It’s a thick, beefy Irish stew of a play, Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, saturated in alcohol and – as you might expect in a McPherson opus — spookily seasoned with the supernatural. Originally produced in London in 2006 and then mounted on Broadway in 2007, it…
Denzel Washington and the Company of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ PHOTO: JULIETA CERVANTES By Ron Cohen You wouldn’t want to stay overnight at Harry Hope’s Saloon and flophouse in Greenwich Village, circa 1912. It’s a place inhabited by down-and-outers, has-beens and never-beens. But for nearly four hours, these folks as portrayed in this George C….
Lauren Ridloff and Joshua Jackson photos by Matthew Murphy By Ron Cohen The wonders of speech and sound, the mysteries of silence and the entanglements of love are interwoven into a deeply moving tapestry in Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God. Now the drama, whose original Broadway production garnered it a…
Glenda Jackson,Alison Pill ,Laurie Metcalf (c) Brigitte Lacombe By Ron Cohen Three Tall Women, Edward Albee’s meditation on aging, dying and death, is undoubtedly among the most vibrantly alive shows on Broadway right now. Three superlative actresses – Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill — tear into Albee’s incomparable writing with intelligence, passion…
Sturgis Warner, Jo Mei, Jeorge Bennett Watson, Sorab Wadia, Steven Skybell By Ron Cohen Babette’s Feast, a short story by Isak Dinesen, was famously transformed into an elegiac Danish movie in 1987, winning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Now, the tale has been transformed once again into a pleasurable…
Barbara Garrick and Laurence Lau By Ron Cohen “The world I came from. It was a totally different culture,” declares the Boston banker Austin toward the end of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life. “All those…surrogates…breathing down your neck. Nurses. Cooks. Maids. Gardeners. Aunts and uncles. Parents, too, of course. And Godparents. Grandparents. Great-grandparents, for…
Lucy DeVito, Paul Molnar, Max Crumm photos by Jeremy Daniel By Ron Cohen For a play that seems compelled to spew lots of graphic sex talk, Hot Mess also dispenses a lot of charm. The script concerns the romance between Elanor, a female standup comic in Los Angeles, and Max, a one-time comic…
John Magaro photos by Joan Marcus By Ron Cohen Before it had the Delacorte Theater, before Hair, A Chorus Line and Hamilton, the New York Shakespeare Festival was in dire straits. And it’s that stressful period that Richard Nelson engrossingly targets in his new play Illyria, offering an affectionate portrait of the Festival’s founder…