The future of warfare looks grim and dystopian. Unmanned predator drones will replace fighter jets with humans guiding them and making decisions. Militaries will pilot these sinister machines from a remove, thousands of miles from the scene, using c...
There may be no decade whose clichs are more threadbare than the Roaring Twenties' -- at least, judging by Speakeasy Dollhouse: Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, an immersive performance created by Cynthia von Buhler. The piece trades in familiar flapper...
Gray, Tudor-timbered, and imposingly featureless, the two-story set of Red Bull Theater's latest Jacobean revival can't help but suggest the slablike expanse the Royal Shakespeare Company whipped up nine blocks north for Wolf Hall. The key differenc...
Marx famously believed that communism was historically inevitable. But in the Russian Revolution epic Doctor Zhivago -- Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel, later an Oscar-winning film, and now a Broadway musical -- fate is more interested in romance. The ...
"The clothes make the man" is a threadbare maxim, but in The Tailor of Inverness -- which kicks off this season's Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 -- it's a gross understatement. For Mateusz Zajac, a Polish soldier marching across Europe, Russia, ...
One doozy of a morning after awaits the couple passed out on a couch in Se Llama Cristina, Octavio Solis's new play at INTAR. But the problem is not the Dewar's and crack they ingested; it's the existential hangover they are about to experience that...
In an interview with Time magazine last year, Ramsey Orta, the man who recorded Officer Daniel Pantaleo's fatal chokehold on Eric Garner, encouraged viewers not to be afraid to bear witness to violence. "Pull out a camera," he advised. "Once you hav...
"From the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions." I invoke the impenetrable poet John Ashbery to highlight the genuine power actual surprise ...
Jonathan Monaghan likes assholes. He likes them a whole lot. His assholes appear out of nowhere and to comic effect, as puckered flesh-colored reliefs from the sanitized, militarized, and luxury-saturated environments the Washington, D.C.-based art...
The House of Tudor looks a lot like House of Cards in Wolf Hall, the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage version of Hilary Mantel's popular novels. Arriving on Broadway from the West End, this sprawling drama goes a long way toward breathing life into...
Jenny Schwartz's disorienting, delightful new musical, Iowa, is a national meditation disguised as family drama. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll with antic songs by Schwartz and composer Todd Almond, this dystopian reverie imagines a loopy, frenetic Ame...
Buzzer, a worthy new play by Tracey Scott Wilson, offers an urban- renewal twist on the we-gotta-get-out-of-this-place play. Although their new neighborhood's blight is starting to get to them, Jackson (Grantham Coleman) and his girlfriend, Suzy ...
"Camerado! This is no book/Who touches this, touches a man," Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass. A profoundly secular transubstantiation, these two lines of poetry changed culture by enmeshing it with nature. Years later the effect of Whitman's p...
What does your era sound like, and how will you know when it ends? The Undeniable Sound of Right Now -- Laura Eason's sweet, funny new play, directed by Kirsten Kelly for the Rattlestick -- explores this perennial question, conjuring a charming port...
Director Liz LeCompte's longstanding dispute with classical forms was one of the things that made the original Wooster Group's productions so magnetic and perplexing. From the ensemble's early 1980s projects, these troublemakers looked for disruptio...
Like the everyday rhapsodies it depicts, downtown ensemble Witness Relocation's Daily Life Everlasting eludes easy description. This is deliberate: Made up of 28 brief sequences, each a kind of theatrical molecule -- a dance, a poem, a song -- the...
Breaking emerged in the Bronx in the 1980s before sweeping the globe, compelling viewers with individual virtuosity and toughness, often performed in a "challenge" format. Flex dance, the form's younger Brooklyn cousin, evolved, contemporaneous with...
The term artiste isn't used much anymore. It reeks of mediocre talent paired with lavish narcissism, a relic of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, a pejorative ironism on the original French. The Artiste in Jean-Luc Lagarce's Music Hall might...
On my way to see Living Here: a map of songs, a collaboration between the Foundry Theatre and roving troubadour Gideon Irving, I strolled up Lafayette Street through a spring snowstorm. I stopped at an opulent loft building that for a time housed...
A psychologist, treating a patient who knows cigarettes cause cancer but can't stop puffing like a chimney, might attribute the phenomenon to cognitive dissonance. An art critic, covering an institution whose romancing of money and power corrupts i...
