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...
Black men in America, the headlines tell us, are under surveillance. But it's one thing to understand the soul-crushing phenomenon of walking while black and another entirely to experience it. For artist Titus Kaphar, the latest indignity came last...
Is this what you call DIY drama? The Human Symphony is written and directed by Dylan Marron, but it's performed by you. Well, some of you. The box office screens potential participants as the audience arrives. When the lights dim and the show start...
Two men from Syria share tea and gossip in a New York apartment, reminiscing about the best shawarma in Damascus and debating the future of the Syrian uprising. But in Laith Nakli's Shesh Yak -- a dark two-hander directed by Bruce McCarty now playin...
Giant color blowups of actors' headshots line the set's upstage wall in Kentucky Cantata, a new play by Paul David Young. In their gazes these performers-for-hire convey self-possession and more than a little hopefulness. The casting photos belong t...
Tomi Ungerer has always been in the wrong place at the perfect time. He was born in 1931, in Alsace -- territory that has changed hands over centuries of sporadic war between Germany and France. His father died when Ungerer was three, leaving...
Peking, 1947: A bustling city teems with international operatives and suspicions. World War II has ended. Communists and nationalists vie for power in China, which sided with the Allies but now faces tumultuous change: Revolution's in the air. In e...
A vampire, no matter how bloodthirsty, can't enter your house if you don't invite her. Supernatural rules like this one make vampire tales gripping but also poignantly perceptive about mortal relationships. This week a stage version of John Ajvide L...
When Gertrude Stein opined that a writer should write with his eyes, she wasn't giving advice to playwrights, but she opened the door to more stage adaptations of her work than even she could have hoped for. Still, her gnomic oeuvre stubbornly resis...
Scott McCloud broke into the independent comics scene in the mid-Eighties with a good-hearted science fiction comic, Zot!, and in subsequent decades he became known for his books on comics theory and technique, Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventi...
There's an instant inside John Miller's Mary Boone show -- it happens in the back room, quite suddenly -- when an exhibition that reads as cool commentary on our appetite for reality television turns into an unexpected meditation on our appetite fo...
Did someone just press rewind on this play? Only a few minutes into Constellations, a drama by Nick Payne imported to Broadway from London, every scene starts to repeat and mutate. It's as if someone keeps reaching for the remote and replaying each ...
Every Thanksgiving, families gather to eat enormous dinners and watch football on TV. But what if the family dinner were the big game -- complete with loudmouthed commentators and embarrassing fouls, heartbreaking fumbles and Hail Mary miracles? Tha...