Contributing Writer
Greig Sargeant (center) and the company of Elevator Repair Service’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE, created by Elevator Repair Service and directed by John Collins, running at The Public Theater. Photo credit: Richard Termine By Ron Cohen With the backing of The Public Theater, Elevator Repair Service, one of New York’s most audacious theater companies –…
Rachel Pickup phtos Carol Rosegg By Ron Cohen Years of Irish-English strife are compacted into one day in Brian Friel’s drama, The Home Place, and the Irish playwright’s sympathies extend to both sides of the fray. It makes for an absorbing if somewhat tempered look into the destructive nature of colonization and political repression,…
Matt McGrath and Arnie Burton Photo credit Carol Rosegg By Ron Cohen In the category of plays dealing with the AIDS epidemic, Lonely Planet is notable for its rather blithe, fanciful ambience. The play, which was first produced in 1991 at the Northlight Theatre in Evanston, Illinois, and saw an Off-Broadway premiere in 1994,…
Liza Colón-Zayas and Carrie Coon photos by Joan Marcus By Ron Cohen Be prepared to have your emotions shredded. Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane quietly pulls you into the life of its title character, a single mother caring for her chronically ill child, and never lets you go. And Herzog does this without any…
By Ron Cohen The story’s a little muddy, but director John Doyle and company still fill this trip to Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden with lots of happy sightseeing. Oscar- and Tony-winner Ellen Burstyn sits quietly on stage, atop a wardrobe trunk, a big book on her lap – presumably the collected works of…
By Ron Cohen The leading character is named Hester, she is a single mom, and she does tote the letter “A” on her persona. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A was, as the playwright has frequently said, inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mid-19th Century novel, The Scarlet Letter. But beyond these salient facts, the play bears…
C.J. Wilson and Mary McCann star in Simon Stephens’s On the Shore of the Wide World, directed by Neil Pepe, at Atlantic Theater Company. (© Ahron R. Foster) By Ron Cohen “it’s really difficult, isn’t it?… Just, the whole business of, you know, being alive. Very complicated,” says a loquacious cab driver toward the close…
By Ron Cohen Van Gogh’s Ear virtually engulfs you in the painter’s art and soul, with both sight and sound: incisive words, breathtaking visuals and ravishing music. The production is the first of three being brought to the Pershing Square Signature Center this season by the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, now…
Photos by Julieta Cervantes By Ron Cohen First published nearly seven decades ago, George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian dystopia, 1984, can still chill your bones with its depiction of things that may come – and may have already arrived on our doorstep: the dumbing-down and mechanization of language; evocation of mass…
Namir Smallwood And Karen Pittman. Photos By Jeremy Daniel. By Ron Cohen The words come at you like machine-gun fire in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline, and they are piercing, powerful and well-aimed. Morisseau has in her sight two deeply complex targets: the corroding educational pipeline with its failing inner city public schools and the…