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ARTICLES BY DATE

2003

Toying with Ibsen, by Martin Puchner
Lee Breuer's bizarre blend of dumb-joke literalism, high opera, and radical chic in Mabou Mines Dollhouse rescues Ibsen's classic work from preachiness, over-familiarity and mechanistic melodrama.

Car Trouble, by Alexis Greene
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.

Moreness or Lessness, by Jonathan Kalb
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.

A Good Fast by Caridad Svich
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.

Theater Games, by Kathleen Dimmick
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
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
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
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.

Somebody's Watching by Don Shewey
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.

Odysseys in America, by Martin Harries
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.

FORUM ON I Am My Own Wife

• On Being a Museum by Robert Brustein
  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
  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 Artifactby Jonathan Kalb
  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
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.

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

Family Americanus, by Alexis Greene
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.

The Poison Talking, by Una Chaudhuri
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."

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

Hard Laughter, by David Finkle
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.

Close Encounters: My Blacks Story, by Una Chaudhuri
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.

Permanent Brain Stasis, by Marc Robinson
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."

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

Deadly Theater Meets Dead Horse, by Gordon Rogoff
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.

A Child Is Being Beaten, by Charles McNulty
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.

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

Come Again?, by Jonathan Kalb
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.

Secrets of Attraction, by Kathleen Dimmick
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.

Colorless Van Gogh, by Robert Brustein
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
The author of Iphigenia Crash Land Falls writes "a torso-monologue for private viewing from a human opera"

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

Bernard Shaw, Coincidentally, by Stanley Kauffmann
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
Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan team up to reconceive Georg Buchner's Woyzeck as an avant-pop musical.

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

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

Paper Wins Again, by Patricia Sternberg
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.

Decibelle Level, by Dorothy Chansky
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.

Different Hats by Una Chaudhuri
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
  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
  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."

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