2010 |2009 |2008 |2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003

Singing the Standards, by Gwynn Dujardin
More thoughtful and less sentimental than its playful and endearing facade suggests, the Tony-winning musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee "atones for the ways spelling has set Americans apart."

Animating Animals, by Martin Puchner
The wonder of Tall Horse, Handspring and Sogolon Puppet Companies' collaborative play about the gift of a giraffe to a 19th-century King of France, is that the puppets animate the humans as much as the humans do the puppets.

Profound Pathologies: A Defense of The Pillowman, by Jonathan Kalb
Martin McDonagh's Broadway success has been called hollow, insincere and meaningless by several distinguished critics, but it's actually rich and resonant--a cheeky contribution to a longstanding debate about the artist's reponsibility to society.

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: The Proust Screenplay, by Stanley Kauffmann
On the occasion of Harold Pinter's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, HotReview.org reprints Kauffmann's moving paean to Pinter's extraordinary, and still un-made, Proust Screenplay.

The Cyclist, by Vijay Tendulkar
An English translation of an allegorical, tactically naive journey-play by India's foremost living dramatist, written in the mid 1990s and intended to be his last drama. Translator Balwant Bhaneja provides an informative Introduction.

The Age of Terror, by Terry Stoller
In separate London theaters, two new documentary plays by Robin Soans--Talking to Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook--present a fascinating range of viewpoints about rage, despair and everyday life in the age of terror.

Bloody London, by Caridad Svich
A critical survey of recent theater in London examines a rash of shows filled with menace and blood, but also (despite local grumbling) a healthy environment for innovative new work.

Teaching at Hunter, by Tina Howe
On the occasion of a celebration of her William Inge Festival Award, Tina Howe shares some thoughts about teaching playwriting at Hunter College for the past 15 years.

Eight Poems for a New Theater Century, by NoPassport
Members of a newly reconceived writers collective protest the cancellation of multicultural playwriting programs at South Coast Rep and the Mark Taper Forum.

No More Enemies, by Babak Ebrahimian
Robert Knopf's Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology--the first book of its kind--is an ambitious compilation of essays, conversations, interviews and statements comparing theater and film by and with dozens of prominent historians, critics and practitioners.

Inviting the Audience: Phelim McDermott in Conversation with Caridad Svich
The co-founder of the U.K.'s Improbable Theatre speaks about Shockheaded Peter, The Hanging Man, 70 Hill Lane, the company's history and technique, their new project (Theater of Blood), and much, much more.

Tribunals at the Tricycle, Nicolas Kent in Conversation with Terry Stoller
The artistic director of London's Tricycle Theatre discusses his long history of political projects--including Guantanamo, The Colour of Justice, and Bloody Sunday--and describes documentary theater as the ideal form for the contemporary world.

Interrogating Drama, by Caridad Svich
Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman" uses the well-oiled mechanisms of TV cop shows and thrillers to speak of the evils of censorship and totalitarian government, but there is nevertheless "something hollow at the heart of this play."

Choose Your Poison, by Martin Harries
Isabella's Room is a "great mess of a dance-theater piece" that deals bravely and disturbingly with "the wreckage of Belgium's colonial past" by refusing easy historical equivalences and satisfactions of narrative.

New Rags, New Bones, by Gordon Carver
A response to Yeats's famous poem "The Circus Animal's Desertion," Noah Haidle's play, Rags and Bones, at Long Wharf Theater, is "a fantasy of literalness, of being literal-minded to the point of fantasy, where one might imagine actually making a ladder up to heaven."

Sarah Kane Was Not a Suicide, by Martin Harries
French actress Isabelle Huppert stands rigidly in place for an hour and three quarters in Claude Regy's extremely demanding production of 4.48 Psychose, Sarah Kane's last play, but the experience is singular, an extraordinary Artaudian exercise in "resisting idenfications."

Hamlet's Wit, by Stanley Kauffmann
The tragic magnitude of Hamlet is as dependent on the title character's wit as on his gravity, and that wit is also the essence of the enduringly modern note the play strikes.

Anatomy of Abandonment, by Caridad Svich
The title character of Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing) is easily ridiculed and reviled, but "this nobody among nobodies, this loser slacker drifting through the ardent episodes of his bored little life" is surprisingly prophetic, a "misanthropic figure for our times."

Fruits of Anger, by J. Ellen Gainor
The product of nearly two decades of research, Linda Ben-Zvi's new biography of the pioneering American playwright Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) is "a compelling and much-needed corrective" to an unfortunate "legacy of dismissal and neglect."

Marina Abramovic Repeats: Pain, Art, and Theater, by Marla Carlson
The spectacle of real pain had very different overtones in Marina Abramovic's re-performance at the Guggenheim Museum of her 1975 work The Lips of Thomas, in which she sliced a star into her stomach with a razor blade, ate a kilo of honey, and lay naked on a cross of ice blocks.

Notes on my Next Project -- ZOMBOID!, by Richard Foreman
In this new manifesto, the inimitable Foreman describes the aims of his upcoming production, which combines film and live performance; he also makes a passionate case for "ELITIST ART."

back to top