Hallie's Comet: The Federal Theatre, by Robert Brustein (Dec. 2003)
This forward to a new book and PBS documentary recounts the "glorious" and "totally improbable" history of The Federal Theatre Project, paying special attention to its "irrepressibly optimistic" director Hallie Flanagan Davis.

Lost in Transnation, by Martin Harries (Dec. 2003)
Alladeen, a multi-media collaboration between New York's Builder's Association and London's motiroti, looks penetratingly at wish-fulfillment and alienation in stories of Indian telephone operators impersonating Americans.

Car Trouble, by Alexis Greene (Nov. 2003)
Paula Vogel's new play, The Long Christmas Ride Home, is a conventional American family drama that uses Asian theatrical conceits to camouflage its dramatic weaknesses.

BOOK FORUM

• Ports of Entry, by Caridad Svich (Nov. 2003)
  Corrosive voices "under siege in the past and present" gather in At the Damascus Gate, a powerful new collection of stories, poems and dramatic pieces by Elana Greenfield.
  
  
• More Big Fat Reference Books! by Jonathan Kalb (Nov. 2003)
  The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance is a prodigious new 2-volume reference work that boldly and intelligently sets out to bridge the gulf between theater studies and performance studies.

Moreness or Lessness, by Jonathan Kalb (Oct. 2003)
The multi-play evening Beckett/Albee is a study in triumph and disaster--half of it sparkles while the other half is spoiled by the very sensibility that fuels the sparkle.

Theater Games, by Kathleen Dimmick (Oct. 2003)
In his new stage adaptation of Chekhov's beloved story "Lady with a Lapdog" at American Repertory Theatre, Russian director Kama Ginkas plays on basic distinctions between the dramatic and the theatrical.

Having Your Cage, by Martin Harries (Oct. 2003)
Charles Mee and SITI Company's bobrauschenbergamerica is an irritatingly perky celebration of clichéd, ebullient, and tiresome Americana that has little to do with the "brutal power" of Rauschenberg's best combines.

To Whom It May Concern, by Terry Stoller (Sept. 2003)
Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo speaks again in all his acerbity, anger, righteousness, love, and humor in Trumbo, a play his son Christopher constructed from his letters.

Divided to Conquer, by Jonathan Kalb (Sept. 2003)
Hope for the world or a passing fluke? Avenue Q and Big River, Broadway musicals that opened within a week of one another, both display fascinating techniques of split focus with much of their complicating power intact.

Odysseys in America, by Martin Harries (Sept. 2003)
Heather Woodbury's 8-hour solo performance, What Ever, aspires to both Shakespeare and jazz--or "Shakespeare as jazz"--and shares important affinities with Angels in America.

A Good Fast by Caridad Svich (Aug. 2003)
In a provocative essay, a respected playwright proposes a moratorium on theater, an interval of reflection on its purpose and seriousness during a slick, consumerist age.

Somebody's Watching by Don Shewey (Aug. 2003)
This personal narrative of The Angel Project, director Deborah Warner's "walking meditation" for one spectator at a time through 9 NYC locations (highlight of the 2003 Linclon Center Festival) describes the piece's quiet power.

Family Americanus, by Alexis Greene (July 2003)
Peter Gaitens's stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham's mammoth 1995 novel Flesh and Blood at New York Theater Workshop is stunningly acted, but the writing doesn't do justice to the book's Aeschylean ambitions.

FORUM ON I Am My Own Wife

• On Being a Museum by Robert Brustein (June 2003)
  In Doug Wright's new play about the famous East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, I Am My Own Wife, the playwright "has found a way to use his gay identity as a universal criticism of life," says Brustein.
  
  
• Artifact as Survivor by Alexis Greene (June 2003)
  Wright's play is flawed but fascinating, says Greene--a portrait of a "veiled and not quite human" character whose greatest virtue is Jefferson Mays's "daring, imaginative performance."
  
  
• Capturing the Artifact by Jonathan Kalb (July 2003)
  An editor's note on Wright's play describes an unremarked aspect of its power and appeal: its ambiguous twist on the genre of docudrama.
  

Landscape for a Saint, by Robert Marx (June 2003)
In a uniquely comprehensive and penetrating essay, Marx reviews the entire opera career of director Peter Sellars, citing his much-debated Salzburg production of Olivier Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise as the pivotal event.

Lost Postcards, by Caridad Svich (June 2003)
A multi-linqual playwright draws heart-breakingly on her extraordinarily travels in these "monologues for a new world map."

How I Watch a Richard Forman Play, by Jonathan Kalb (June 2003)
A reflection on being a veteran Foreman-watcher, originally written for the program book of Panic! at the Wiener Festwochen

Hard Laughter, by David Finkle (June 2003)
Douglas Carter Beane's Mondo Drama and Foley and McColl's The Play What I Wrote provide grist for a critical meditation on the "rules" of comedy.

A Child Is Being Beaten, by Charles McNulty (May 2003)
Two current Broadway offerings--Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Reza's Life (x) 3--prompt a critical meditation on the haunting figure of the abused child in modern drama.

Secrets of Attraction, by Kathleen Dimmick (May 2003)
Soho Rep stages the New York premiere--35 years delayed!--of Marie Irene Fornes's "mordantly unique look at love, dependency, repulsion and sexual need," Molly's Dream.

Paper Wins Again, by Patricia Sternberg (May 2003)
The director of one proud children's theater, the Hunter College Mad Hatters, reflects on the 45-year history of another, The Paper Bag Players.

Enter Shylock: A Note on Language, by Stanley Kauffmann (Apr. 2003)
Shakespeare's infamous Jew is reconsidered through the lens of his first four words.

Come Again?, by Jonathan Kalb (Apr. 2003)
Yasmina Reza, author of the slick and implausible hit Art, does it again, and again, and again, in Life (x) 3--her new play at Circle in the Square, which keeps starting over.

Colorless Van Gogh, by Robert Brustein (Apr. 2003)
Nicholas Wright, author of Mrs. Klein, imagines an early romance of one of modernism's greatest painters and renders it indistinguishable from Harold and Maude.

Torn Limb, by Caridad Svich (Apr. 2003)
The author of Iphigenia Crash Land Falls writes "a torso-monologue for private viewing from a human opera"

The Poison Talking, by Una Chaudhuri (Mar. 2003)
Robert Falls's Broadway production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy, offers "endless insights into the American cultural imaginary."

Close Encounters: My Blacks Story, by Una Chaudhuri (Mar. 2003)
Genet's rarely produced, classic play is a terrifying meditation on the Manicheanism of racial perceptions. The Classical Theater of Harlem's hard-hitting, courageous production extends its run and moves downtown.

Deadly Theater Meets Dead Horse, by Gordon Rogoff (Mar. 2003)
A veteran critic ponders "visual chic" and other alarming matters in the current BAM theater season, including Fiona Shaw's Medea and the Donmar Warehouse Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night.

Pictures at a Non-Execution, by Jonathan Kalb (Mar. 2003)
The powerful docudrama The Exonerated couples reality-theater with what may be its ideal subject: capital punishment.

Home to Roost, by Christine Evans (Mar. 2003)
An Australian playwright who travels frequently to Macedonia writes a disturbing text on the "post-performance" of war: "an impossible play cannibalized by events."

Permanent Brain Stasis, by Marc Robinson (Feb. 2003)
Richard Foreman's 35th-anniversary Ontological-Hysteric Theater production, Panic! (How to Be Happy!), gives theatrical life to "a mind tormented by its own ingenuity."

Decibelle Level, by Dorothy Chansky (Feb. 2003)
Director Michael Kahn gives new life to Ben Jonson's complicated comedy in the rarely produced Epicoene;, or The Silent Woman in Washington, DC, but the work's misogyny is left intact.

In Colder Blood, by Jonathan Kalb (Jan. 2003)
Karin Coonrod transforms Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into a sleek and lucid meditation on democracy for the Bush/Enron era.

Dirty Thoughts About Money, by NoPassport (Jan. 2003)
A "virtual performance collective" that is also a band composes a serial dialogue-cum-manifesto about theater, money, and creativity.

Different Hats by Una Chaudhuri (Jan. 2003)
Caryl Churchill gives ominous new meaning to the "hat trick" in Far Away, her chilling play about horror and dishonesty about horror.

FORUM ON A.R.T.'S Children of Herakles

• P.C. for the Ages by Alisa Solomon (Jan. 2003)
  Director Peter Sellars uses the rarely produced Children of Herakles by Euripides as anchor for an evening-length forum at ART on international refugees. Solomon says the evening doesn't quite gel.
  
  
• Real Children and Other Quandaries by Scott T. Cummings (Jan. 2003)
  The ART evening does gel, says Cummings. Sellars' use of real refugee children in the chorus, along with the accompanying panel discussions and film series, give the marathon undertaking "arc and amplitude."

Bernard Shaw, Coincidentally, by Stanley Kauffmann (Dec. 2002)
How the author of You Never Can Tell, Man and Superman and Heartbreak House made absurdly convenient coincidences into subtle instruments of dramatic art.

Song Logic, by Jonathan Kalb (Dec. 2002)
Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan team up to reconceive Georg Buchner's Woyzeck as an avant-pop musical.

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