Are there two Kieran Culkins? The one who shows up in the first act of the uneven revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is, let’s say it, something of a disaster. He’s slower and softer than everyone who has preceded him, throwing Mamet’s galloping but precise rhythms totally off. Intermission passes, and the Culkin…
What and how you speak: this is who you are. That is the idea behind Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English, now at the Roundabout. A co-production with the Atlantic Theater Company, English is set a classroom in Iran, where students are preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). English presents…
Funny/not funny, and timely as hell, Eureka Day pokes hard at the vaccination debate. Manhattan Theatre Club, known for producing plays that deal with difficult subjects, somehow makes even the thorniest controversies deeply entertaining. They have done it again: Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day mercilessly satirizes the aggressively woke parents and board members at Eureka Day,…
Cult of Love is appropriately named. The cult is religion — and “love” translates as control. The searing holiday family dramedy, now on Broadway at the Hayes Theater, begins with a loud, overly long Christmas carol. But the gaiety feels forced; the siblings participate in a childhood ritual that will explode in a cacophony of…
Memoirs can be self-serving or enlightening. If the author is funny, rueful and aware of personal ironies, they can be both. That’s the case with Delia Ephron (“You’ve Got Mail”), the Hollywood screenwriter/novelist who penned a best-selling 2022 memoir. She addressed her cancer recovery and the surprise of finding love after her husband’s death. Ephron,…
Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, a new play about artificial intelligence, is likely to please some theatergoers and leave others with deeply furrowed brows. Under the direction of Bartlett Sher, and starring Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey, Jr., the drama investigates how authors use AI to help them craft their literary works and also save them from…
Thanks to Sam Gold, Generation Z now has an opportunity to get up close and personal with Romeo + Juliet, which recently opened at Circle in the Square. Although some may object to the production’s conspicuous courting of a youthful audience, this 36th Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s early tragedy is bound to score with those…
Kenny Leon, director of the current streamlined revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, brings a fresh new interpretation to the classic. He takes the revered play and makes it into a multicultural theatrical statement that invites everybody to enjoy this hauntingly sublime work. Our Town is an outlier in American…
The Hills of California, to begin with, isn’t about California, or even hills. The title of Jez Butterworth’s great big Broadway play refers to some mid-20th century Johnny Mercer pop ballad, not a famous one, that receives several renditions here, along with Rodgers and Hart and other American songbook standards. At once a searing look…
Part backstage comedy, part political satire, part based in fact and part pure fiction, David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face is by turns hilarious, touching, and disturbing. It’s been suggested that we might appreciate the gift to see ourselves as other see us. But we might not. Yellow Face pokes hard at identity politics, as it…