Remember Love, American Style? It was a lighthearted attempt at feminism and gender-bending, which somehow always ended up in bawdy, wide-angle shots of breasts and behinds and concluded in catty dialogues that took place in a huge, brass four-poster bed. As a youngster I tuned in for the opening shot…
Over the River and Through the Woods (written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Kenneth Kay) is one of those plays you walk out of saying, “Gee, my mother would have loved that,” and lo and behold, you look around and there is your mother — and all of her…
Before Women Who Love Too Much and Codependent No More, there was Georgia O’Keeffe and her watercolors. Characteristically dressed in a long black sweater, O’Keeffe peers out at the audience from the dimly lit stage of the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre. “Watercolors are tricky,” she observes in Lucinda McDermott’s O’Keeffe! “When…
Praying with the Enemy
Immigration is a physical act. A body of water is crossed; a mountain range grows smaller and smaller until it appears to be the knuckles of a hand resting on the earth. A dissonant jumble of consonants and vowels seeps into our thoughts until our dreams are flooded. We fall…
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
In 1615 John Donne did something that changed the course of his life, and four hundred years later, the life of Vivian Bearing Ph.D.: He became an Anglican priest. Donne dedicated his life to writing religious prose and poetry. As a priest and poet he explored the barriers of mortality…
What happens when you put Hot Lips Houlihan in yellow chiffon three sizes too tight on a roof with a ghost who looks like he could be a skinny second cousin of Elvis Presley? Paste this scene against a Technicolor blue sky reminiscent of those you see in toilet paper…
Los Angeles dramatist David Rambo (his real name) describes his discovery of a televangelist’s audio technician as the missing link in his three-character play this way: “The Heavens opened, so to speak. I realized I had a trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost!” But in his play God’s…
Madonna, heaven help us, has yet to don patchwork jeans and a tiara and croon “Cat’s in the Cradle” to a synthesized beat. But the day still may come when Harry Chapin’s ballads, like Don McLean’s “American Pie,” become fodder for the pop diva’s gristmill. Until then you can trip…
Critics die. Audiences are reincarnated. The only true test of a work of art’s value is its timelessness, and perhaps its timeliness. Timelessness is the ability of drama to say something about the human condition in a way that penetrates generation after generation of audiences. Timeliness is the director’s (in…
Be honest. If someone told you ahead of time that you were going to see a play that depicts the coming-of-age of a young black girl somewhere in the South during the mid-Sixties, you might want to respond, “What a shame! I have a root canal to attend to.” Or,…
First the good news: GableStage’s new production of Killer Joe features smart staging and engaging performances, backed up by a terrific design team. South Florida theatergoers should consider themselves lucky to have this company in their midst. Now the not so good news: Despite the merits of this particular production,…
“Sorry I’m late,” whines the dominatrix in Communicating Doors. “I think there was a gun battle in the Strand.” She sports a tattoo, nosebleed heels, and a leopard-print coat, underneath which is a layer of patent leather lingerie, complete with zippers dangling from pointy nipples. Poopay, as she calls herself…
[Exit, pursued by a bear] — The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare Being a theater critic is one of the best jobs ever invented, so it is with mixed emotions that I’m leaving behind my duties at New Times to pursue new adventures in Washington, D.C. With apologies to dance fans,…
Change is the metaphor that pervades Eleanor: Her Secret Journey, in which Jean Stapleton gives an affecting and affectionate portrait of first lady and Hillary Clinton precursor Eleanor Roosevelt. Indeed the young society wife and mother transformed herself into one of the most influential people of the Twentieth Century. Despite…
The most memorable detail in Tom Tom on a Rooftop, Daniel Keough’s new play now receiving its East Coast premiere in Hollywood, is a piece of the set. The feeble comedy takes place entirely on the tarpaper roof of a modest apartment building, where, amid lawn chairs and milk crates,…
Of all the versions of Cuba that exist, few are as fragmented or elusive as those that live in the memory of exiles. Anyone who left the island before his or her own memories really began or grew up in the United States with exile parents knows stories of how…
By sheer coincidence, A Bicycle Country, Nilo Cruz’s bewitching play about the fate of three balseros, is premiering against the backdrop of the political drama of the young rafter Elian Gonzalez. Or is it coincidence? If six-year-old Elian hadn’t been rescued off Palm Beach on Thanksgiving Day, then perhaps some…
The single poignant moment in Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story depicts an imperiously fragile moment of rock and roll history, the one in which protorocker Buddy Holly wrote the song “Everyday.” Not the best or the most popular of Holly’s work, the tune nonetheless is charming, and so much…
Like most people at a recent performance of Arje Shaw’s powerful work The Gathering, I had tears in my eyes by the end of the two-hour drama. And like many around me, I suspect, I found the plight of Gabe, the Holocaust survivor at its center, imperiously heart-wrenching. All the…
The seedy Berlin of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is so familiar to us that to encounter the sedate world of John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera is something of a shock. Instead of the Kit Kat Club, we get Christopher Isherwood’s tiny apartment; in place of goose-stepping Nazis, we…
