You can hardly pass a toy store these days without thinking of Jeff Koons. Mr. Porcelain Smile has so deeply incorporated children's playthings into his massive Whitney survey -- those riffs on inflatable bunnies and dolphins; that storied balloon d...
"Peter is one of my oldest friends," says Maureen (Heidi Armbruster). Her hand clasps her collar to underline her moral certainty, but we're not at all convinced. Just a moment ago, this volatile New Yorker had excoriated her supposed "friend" (not ...
It seems fitting that any production of The Maids -- the play that launched what came to be known as Theater of the Absurd -- should be somewhat absurd itself. In the Lincoln Center Festival's production (presented in association with the New York C...
When is a one-night stand not a one-night stand? When it leads to the abortion clinic. That is, according to Scott Organ's Phoenix, a brittle romantic comedy revived by the Rattlestick and starring Julia Stiles and James Wirt. Stiles plays Sue, a...
In 1992, I owed a favor to a production designer in the film industry, and he asked me to create a series of paintings for the character of a penniless artist in a feature co-written by a little-known director from Taiwan. One summer day, a gaggle o...
Riverside Drive makes a nice address, but it lacks one amenity: moral clarity. For longtime cop Walter "Pops" Washington (Stephen McKinley Henderson), that means nursing his wounds eight years after having been shot by a white rookie while drunk and...
One of the many obstacles to a truly great American classical theater tradition is the way we reflexively default to contemporary naturalism. Actors, often trained to assimilate a role into personal experience, work to relate characters created cent...
Thank you, MoMA, for all the dizzying vinyl graphics buzzing around the entrance to the Christopher Williams show. The truncated excerpts from the exhibition catalog, printed in hypersaturated red, yellow, and black make no curatorial claims and onl...
McAllen, Texas, sits in the Rio Grande Valley at a crossroads of fates. Desperate migrants fleeing murderous drug wars arrive on the threshold of salvation. Magnates with shady interests on the other side of the border sit in their mansion perches, ...
"I've always been sensible and good," cries Isabelle Parry (Keilly McQuail), a Southern belle getting her first taste of the wicked big city. Now our ingenue just wants to drink old-fashioneds, free of her boorish but "honorable" fianc (Thomas ...
New Yorkers are accustomed to publicly admitting our provincialism while privately upholding the belief that we live at the center of it all. The New Museum's current exhibition "Here and Elsewhere" does nothing if not deftly point out that, at leas...
"People should take Gertrude seriously," declares the queen, speaking of herself in the third person. Howard Barker's 2002 rendering of Hamlet defends the title character (Hamlet's mother), by rethinking her tongue-tied collusion in her husband's mu...
"I want to be known," says the magnetic young actor Zak Resnick, playing the part of songwriter Bert Berns. Bert who? Berns, the subject of this biographical jukebox musical, penned several of the best-known hits of the 1960s, including "Twist and S...
Idris Seabright's cottage looks idyllic. Pink paint and potted palms give her living room just the right tropical breeziness. A portrait of flinty, bearded Captain Horace Seabright hangs over her tasteful mantel, honoring the family patriarch who se...
Larry Clark's latest exhibition, "they thought i were but i aren't anymore...," is a small survey of sorts, composed of photographs, collages, and -- for the first time -- paintings by the New York-based artist/filmmaker who made his name more than ...
The Qualification of Douglas Evans, a deeply compelling new play for the Amoralists by Derek Ahonen, looks at addiction without embellishment. It skips the pathos we're used to seeing in drinking stories and instead takes a steady march through a li...
How is it that the nation that vilified the avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century somehow brought forth a band of artists that propelled vanguard art into the 21st century? Are Joseph Beuys (1921 -- 1986), Sigmar Polke (1941 -- 2010), an...
A musical about the Manhattan Project? Bring on the dancing physicists and chorus girls in lab coats. Belt out those odes to fissure. Enrich our hearts with uranium! Atomic is in staggeringly bad taste, but (unfortunately) not in some outrageous, se...
If you think those people in The Birds had it bad, just wait till you meet Frank, the nebbishy hero of Robin Frohardt's puppet play The Pigeoning. Now running at HERE, this charmingly quirky spectacle follows a nervous office worker's descent into m...
At first glance, Fat Baby looks like any other Lower East Side bar on a weeknight. A woman waits for someone while texting impatiently. A guy on a stool engages his date and the bartender in a movie-trivia conversation. A reedy twink in Nantucket Re...
