The plays of August Wilson have been so celebrated in print that it is probably pointless to begin the discussion anew. If he wasn’t the most poetic, the most novel, the most fun, or the most profound of recent American playwrights, he certainly combined all of those elements to a…

Adam Szymkowicz’s Nerve needs a new name. Its two characters are notable for many things — guilelessness, instability, horniness, and especially awkwardness — but their nerve is notable only by its absence. Elliot and Susan are a couple who meet on the Internet and then enjoy a first, fumbling date…

The mixtape cannot achieve perfection. Place Adrian Belew side by side with the X-Ray Specs, and you might draw undue attention to Belew’s geekiness. Pair Patti Smith with the Rolling Stones, and she might come off as a blowhard. On almost any mixtape, at least one song will fail to…

An actor — I won’t say which one — once told me that Joe Adler doesn’t write down notes on blocking. This is true. Last Saturday, as the crew at GableStage headed into the final week of preparations for David Mamet’s new presidential comedy, November, the actors couldn’t quite keep…

When I saw the new Actors’ Playhouse production of 1776, a row of youngsters was seated immediately behind me. Before showtime, they were discussing the election. A 13-year-old boy said, “Don’t be stupid. If Obama wins, everyone will love America.” A 10-year-old replied, “Nuh-uh. Barack Obama doesn’t even love America.”…

In the latest play from the Edge Theatre’s artistic director, Jim Tommaney, a young, queer drama critic (like me) works for an alternative newsweekly in South Florida (like this one, but called CityTimes) and writes nasty, bitchy notices about everything he sees, regardless of quality (“It’s not about the play!”…

What if Iraq had gone well? was the question many good-hearted liberals asked after reading George Packer’s 2007 New Yorker article Betrayed. Suddenly everything that seemed to be true about our then-foundering effort was not only wrong but also naively beside the point. The article told the story of the…

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, is a lot of things. It is a courtroom drama and a comedy. It is both a Christian and an existentialist apology — and it attempts to fuse those disparate philosophies. As presented by Ground Up and Rising, it is…

It takes a brave company to produce a play about Tupac Shakur. What market might it appeal to? How many people in Kendall can say they enjoy Tupac and theater? If you go to Amazon.com and purchase Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., the website does not inform you that “Customers who…

Tramaine Berryhill’s set for The Fannie Lou Hamer Story is a strange stars-and-stripes affair — all wood, all old-looking, all dusty. The designs are big and loud, but the colors are faded; it’s the kind of structure out of which ghosts of old carnival barkers might step. The platforms upon…

The last time Ronald Reagan referred to America as a “shining city on a hill,” he directly attributed the quote to the Puritan John Winthrop. Winthrop, he said, wrote the phrase en route to America to “describe the America he imagined,” which, according to Reagan, “was important, because he was…

Theatergoing is generally an expensive hobby, but not this week. If you play your cards right, you can see 18 plays for $102. That’s 16 short plays at City Theatre’s Summer Shorts festival (for $92, including dinner, or see them separately for $37 apiece) and two one-acts at the new…

City Theatre’s Summer Shorts was maybe the biggest thing to hit South Florida theater in 2007. It became enshrined as one of the two major short-play festivals in the nation when it partnered with Louisville’s famed Actors’ Theatre and moved from its old home at the Ring Theatre to the…

There are two kinds of jokes in Rupert Holmes’s Thumbs: good ones and bad ones. I’m going to spoil one of each for you, but you’ll recoup the loss if you decide to see the play. Thumbs is short on many things, but not on jokes. Here’s a good one:…

We’re getting to this one a few weeks late, and that’s wrong. There isn’t a single person in eyeshot of this newspaper who couldn’t benefit from From the Mississippi Delta — a play so bighearted, so sassily smart, so emotionally tempestuous, so spiritually gratifying, and so LMAO funny that it’s…

Depressed playwright Sarah Kane killed herself in 1999, and 4.48 Psychosis was her last work. It sounds like a last work, too: full of desperate and unhappy self-indulgence, a sense of options exhausted and possibilities closed. Think of the sound of Elvis Presley’s booming, bloated voice on 1977’s Moody Blue,…

Dialectics being the dry things they are, plays set up around meetings-of-minds tend toward the masturbatory and dull. The Mission isn’t either, because of an almost Murder She Wrote-like penchant for pulpy plot twists and sudden shocking revelations. Awful as that sounds, and awkwardly as it’s executed (the most shocking…

Dear God, what can be said about Forbidden Broadway? Even the most overwhelmingly devoted theatergoers who see the thing can’t think of much to say on the ride home. Mostly, the postshow wrapup goes something like this: “Hey! Remember when they sang ‘Liza One Note’? That was funny, wasn’t it?”…

It’s Carbonell time again. The auditorium at the Broward Center has been booked for months, the menu for the sponsors’ gala has long been planned and vetted, and South Florida’s theaterfolk have already decided what to wear. As I write, the definitive list of winners and losers is sitting in…

Plenty of bad things have their partisans. Vegemite, for example. Leonardo DiCaprio, for another. Industrial pork farming. Ralph Reed. American Idol. And so it goes with The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a wonderful play by Tennessee Williams being brutally murdered by Jim Tommaney and the giddy psychopaths at…

Not far from Joe Adler’s GableStage, convicted sex offenders live under a bridge because they’re not allowed to live anywhere else. Many of us in the surrounding area are happy about that; we think the bridge is a perfectly good place for those people, if we really must share terra…

Spamalot: Strictly speaking, Spam is a cooked-meat product containing bits of many long-dead animals — pigs, chickens, turkeys, clumsy factory workers — jammed together and canned for the gastronomic pleasure of Hawaiians and normal people alike. Spamalot is not a dissimilar product. It’s a Tony Award-winning retelling of Monty Python…