When you attend a dance performance, you sit and watch other people move. They warm up; you settle down. They bask in bright light; you find yourself in the dark, literally and often metaphorically. In the old days, you'd sit while performers act...
Is that a chill in the air? Unlikely. Autumn in New York doesn't lack for sizzle. With heat and humidity subsiding and tourists making tracks, New York is left for its locals to enjoy in the months before the holidays. Though the leaves are changing...
Could 2014 be the season when New York reinvigorates its classical theater at long last? There's plenty of red meat for those who like big names and revivals, starting with Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's comic chestnut You Can't Take It With You,...
On a wintry Chicago night in 2000, Davy Rothbart found a note stuck beneath the windshield of his car. It was addressed to Mario. He opened it anyway. "Mario," the note read. "I fucking hate you. You said you had to work. Why is your car here,...
While your pumpkin spice latte cools, peruse the this index of our 2014 Fall (arts) Issue: [Art] This Fall, Embrace the Unfamiliar in the Art World, by Robert Shuster [Art] Robert Gober's Angsty Minimalism Hits MOMA in October, by Jessica Daws...
James Lee Byars was an artist possessed of certain elegance. He dressed impeccably in silk or linen suits, velvet or gold lam, often custom-made by a tailor who called himself Mr. North South. He wore an oversized hat, its tall top and wide brim cu...
In a month when American race relations appear to have reached a historic low, the subject matter of Naomi Wallace's And I and Silence -- an interracial love story with a tragic end -- feels especially apt. The play itself...well, that's more of a m...
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 ...
Pigs shriek. We hear the squealing herds of swine as they face the knife -- part of a massive culling to control the spread of a virus. These earsplitting, nerve-jangling sounds recur in the more introspective moments of Useless, Saviana Stanescu's ...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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, ...
"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...
