Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…

“It sure was a beautiful night,” says Jamie Tyrone, one of the two survivors in American theater’s most famous morning-after scene. “I’ll never forget it,” this drunk says to Josie Hogan, the woman who has given him the only respite from misery he’s likely to get in this life. But…

William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of the Iliad. But would…

David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…

The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be. Few…

Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans onstage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up residence…

Li’l Bit, the haunted protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, compares her Uncle Peck to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary figure condemned to travel the Earth until a maiden loves him of her own free will. The play, which won author Paula Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama,…

At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” as he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore,…

A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea (a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends), can its…

After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ, encased in a black box, to the asylum’s caretaker. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…

This is the season during which British playwright David Hare is printing his own currency on Broadway. In April the much ballyhooed The Blue Room, starring a naked Nicole Kidman, will be joined by a New York production of Amy’s View, featuring theater luminary Judi Dench. Soon after that Hare…

A woman in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile makes this comment about the famous painter: “He says that occasionally there is a ‘Picasso’ and he is him.” You can substitute the word genius for Picasso and get the sense of what this phrase means. The comedy appears to…

Imagine you’re watching an early play by an obscure playwright — say, a farce with a plot that’s difficult to take seriously. Perhaps it contains a case of mistaken identity, at least one sharp-tongued female character, and some confusion about the proper nature of marriage. Say the conflicts are resolved,…

Add the late Tallulah Bankhead to the list of middle-age women throwing themselves into the national political fray this year. The celebrated actress, as currently portrayed in the American premiere of Tallulah by movie star Kathleen Turner, has even less bona fide political experience than either Liddy Dole or Hillary…

“First of all, when you’ve got a gun,” Stephen Sondheim points out in his musical Assassins, “everybody pays attention.” That’s for sure, as audience members experiencing the third-act explosion in a classic drama such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters can attest. But what happens when you have two guns? What if…

She’s the Medea of all stage mothers, the most frightening diva of the American musical theater. That would be Mama Rose, of course, the stardom-fixated monster at the center of Gypsy. Since 1959 audiences have clung to her poisonous apron strings, happily singing along. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Tyne…

When a damsel with golden ring-curls finds herself tied to railroad trestles by a mustachioed villain, or, as in Little Mary Sunshine, strapped to a tree by a vicious Indian, most audience members know that the lady in peril will be rescued momentarily, either by the entire U.S. cavalry, or…

In the second half of Steve Dietz’s new play Rocket Man, time moves backwards in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on Earth. Teenagers, veterans by comparison, choose the parents who will care for them as they grow younger and more dependent. And on one character’s sweet-sixteen…

Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He’s playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he’s playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig’s 1995 Broadway hit, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in 1953 who, by…