You have to supply your own laugh track at Fish in the Dark, comedian Larry David's first Broadway foray. But that's just about the only thing different from watching David's work for TV. Boppy xylophone jazz with doobie-doo scatting vocals announce...
Are you a closet monarchist? Do you harbor nostalgia for absolute leaders from unimpeachable family trees? If so, Peter Morgan's The Audience -- starring the theatrically royal Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II -- might be for you. If not, its plea...
If the Northeast has such nasty weather, why is it home to so many utopian experiments, from Walden to Woodstock? You may find yourself pleasantly pondering such questions while watching Old Paper Houses, a bittersweet ensemble piece from the compa...
If you think you recognize one of the paintings from the Fox evening soap Empire on the walls of the Brooklyn Museum's Kehinde Wiley retrospective, you're only half wrong. By now the Wiley formula is so familiar -- and so legible on TV -- that it...
"Everything happens to us. The good ones," June (Elizabeth Dement) complains. That's how it goes in old age: The body starts to fail and the mind can become susceptible. You start to catalog life's deficiencies and a day can seem like a marathon of...
In The Mystery of Love and Sex, Bathsheba Doran appears to have written a play about lust and romance for people who have not experienced those things. Directed by Sam Gold and playing at Lincoln Center, Doran's drama follows two pairs of characters...
"Soul mates -- an idea that may or may not exist." With those words, spoken in the opening moments, Tanya Barfield's new play Bright Half Life commences catapulting through a romance. Barfield's fluid drama time-travels across a long-term relationsh...
When violent revolutions struck Europe and Latin America in the 1840s, a French newspaper editor named Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr summed up the craze for newfangled social, political, and cultural forms with an enduring phrase: Plus a change, pl...
We tend to accept that certain plays carry a weight that makes them permanently essential. The Iceman Cometh is one of them. With its quasi- biblical title, Eugene O'Neill's barroom epic whispers of salvation and promises a deep dive into human cha...
What kind of superhero does Brooklyn need? A subway speeder-upper? An affordable-housing magician? In Brooklynite, a new musical by Peter Lerman and Michael Mayer (Mayer also directs), six ordinary borough dwellers gain superpowers -- fire, water, i...
What if you had to write a memoir but lacked scintillating real-life events to document? Amateur fantasy-fiction writer Jo Darum (Anna Camp) finds herself in precisely that predicament in Nick Jones's enjoyable new meta-play, Verit, now at LCT3. ...
You could call All Our Happy Days Are Stupid an adolescent play -- in the best sense. Two of the protagonists are self-possessed twelve-year-old schoolmates. When one of them disappears in Paris during a family vacation, both of their mothers take o...
In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge, already famous for his split-second photographic studies of animals and humans in motion, changed technological gears to create a 360-degree panorama of San Francisco, a process so labor-intensive and time-consuming that ...
In Joel Drake Johnson's trenchant Rasheeda Speaking -- a New Group production crisply directed by Cynthia Nixon -- workplace racism, unacknowledged but ubiquitous, is like a particularly noxious pollutant. Call it social DDT: Odorless and traceless,...
If beauty is skin deep, how deep is fashion? Not very, to judge by Sheila Callaghan's Everything You Touch, a clothes-conscious new drama directed by Jessica Kubzansky and produced by the Rattlestick, now playing at the Cherry Lane. This time-travel...
Don't wonder what an eighteenth-century Aborigine is doing in a play inspired by the mass shooting on Norway's Utya Island that killed 77 people in 2011. He is Exhibit A in the case for multiculturalism that is David Greig's The Events, which Londo...
It's not every day you exit an art show wondering where the artist got her cadavers. But quite a few make appearances in Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's raw, sometimes mawkish, but deeply unforgettable show at SculptureCenter, so you can't ...
You wouldn't know it from what you see on the American stage today, but drama holds deep roots in poetry. Rhapsodic and verse forms have provided an essential vehicle for playwrights imagining new experiences -- from the ancient Greeks' ritual dithy...
In order to watch Matthew Freeman's new play The Listeners, you must lean forward, mush your face into a plywood wall, and squint through a narrow slit. You're peeking into a room: patterned wallpaper, odd paintings, thrift-shop furniture. (The thin...
There are two ways to review a popular art exhibition today: alone and with everybody else. That goes double for a fashionable show like the Museum of Modern Art's "The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World," which opened to large...
