Elmer Rice wrote The Adding Machine in 1923, a play about the devastating effects of technology on employment. A bookkeeper with 25-years of dependable service is replaced by an adding machine touted as more efficient, without the need of skilled labor. Mr. Zero (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a cog in a corporate machine, will be replaced by a high…
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Hamlet arrives not as a museum piece but as a joltingly alive modern tragedy, with director Robert Hastie stripping away centuries of dust to reveal the play’s unnerving immediacy. Led by a magnetic, emotionally volatile performance from Hiran Abeysekera, this National Theatre production proves both darkly funny and…
Baize Buzan (Photo: Alexia Haick) Beauty Freak By Julia Polinsky James Clements has given us a new play about Leni Riefenstahl. She was one of the more fascinating and polarizing people of the 20th century. Unquestionably a feminist pioneer, she was also a monster of pragmatism, using concentration-camp inmates as extras in her film, then…
The ultra-violent Titus Andronicus is now enjoying (if you can use that word) a splendid revival at Signature Theatre, in the skillful hands of the Red Bull Theatre Company. And oh, is it sensational! Prepare yourself for the horrific story. Titus Andronicus (Patrick Page) is a Roman general who has returned after a ten-year war…
As four sisters gather on the anniversary of their father’s death for a jesa, a Korean ritual to honor the dead, tensions mount. Their emotions run the gamut from reverence to regret, rage to resentment. After all, family harmony is often more myth than reality. For many, turmoil is just beneath the surface. It only…
In Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), playwright Anna Ziegler reimagines Sophocles’ tragedy through a contemporary, self-aware lens that blurs the boundaries between text and memory. While this bold adaptation doesn’t fully cohere—and Tyne Rafaeli’s direction tends to favor deliberation over dramatic momentum—it opens a provocative dialogue with the classic that invites deeper…
Just imagine: you are a gazillionaire tech bro super uber master of the universe. Everything money can buy, you can buy. But you can’t buy youth or health. Or, with sufficient planning and unlimited funds, can you? Spare Parts, a new play by David J. Glass now at Theater Row, posits that maybe, just maybe…
The correlation between mental illness and art is an intriguing one. That’s especially true when the topic is Outsider Art, work created by a self-taught artist far removed from the mainstream. Henry Darger, the focus of Bughouse, may be the most famous Outsider artist in the world, with his paintings now commanding huge sums. It’s…
An unambitious, ordinary, middle-class young man has been hassled by those around him into considering himself a nonentity. Along comes a spirited, forward-thinking young woman who sees qualities in him that others don’t, and together they forge a romantic relationship that convinces him of his worth and thrusts them into a brighter future. That’s Hobson’s…
The scene is Rome; the time is the fourth century BC. But its themes of war, power, and leadership resonate painfully and urgently today. Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1605), in a compelling revival at the Theatre for a New Audience, tells the story of a fiery, fanatical warrior named Caius Martius (played by McKinley…