USA Reviews

Writer: William Shakespeare Director & Adaptor: Erica Schmidt Reviewer: Adrienne Sowers The politics of being a preteen girl are dark, complex, and can feel like life-or-death stakes are involved. Whispers and rumors fuel hormone-charged energies and create tension and high drama. So it stands to reason that Red Bull Theater’s production of MacBeth, ably adapted and directed by Erica Schmidt, ...

Choreographer: Shamel Pitts Reviewer: Carrie Lee O’Dell Dancer and Choreographer Shamel Pitts is proud of his Brooklyn roots. In press materials and interviews, he talks about his youth in Brooklyn and the role that the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s programming played in shaping his own work. It’s fitting, then, that he returned to Brooklyn during Mother’s Day weekend to perform ...

Created and Composed by Lauren Maul Reviewer: Charlotte Lang-Bush In the fluorescently-lit basement beneath the Judson Memorial Church, a chipper real estate agent holds a ghoulish flashlight under her chin as she chirps about the multiple gory murders that happened in the house she’s selling. Later, a group of gleeful schoolgirls put on an ingeniously sinister shadow-puppet show about Wolf ...

Writer: Falk Richter Director: Ildiko Nemeth Reviewer: Robert Price Electronic City begins with big questions, spoken by an ensemble dressed all in black: Where am I, who am I, and what is the series of numbers I need to open this briefcase? Existential quandary in the smartphone era doesn’t sound all that different from the Greek chorus-style playwriting of the ...

Writer: Claire Kiechel Director: Steve Cosson Reviewer: Carrie Lee O’Dell In a program note for Paul Swan is Dead and Gone, playwright Claire Kiechel recalls the first time she heard about her great-great uncle Paul Swan, who her grandmother described as “very strange”; in the parlance of Kiechel’s native Nebraska she understood that to mean he was “loud, queer, and ...

Writer: John Webster Director: Louisa Proske Reviewer: Solace Murder, Mayhem, and Fun! This is John Webster’s The White Devil, currently running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York’s West Village. Webster, who wrote his plays in the 17th century, usually collaborated with others; however, scholars believe The White Devil was the first play he wrote by himself. The White ...

Writer: Lyle Kessler Director: Lee Brock Reviewer: Solace The Barrow Group’s current production, Perp, by Lyle Kessler, American playwright, screenwriter and actor, best known internationally for Orphans, the play he wrote in 1983. Perp is the story of a vicious killer on the loose and the kindhearted Douglass (Ali Arkane) finding himself the unwitting target of detectives, played by Tricia ...

Writer: Chisa Hutchinson Director: Jessi D. Hill Reviewer: Solace The first production of Keen Company’s 2019 season is the New York premiere of Chisa Hutchinson’s Surely Goodness and Mercy, directed by Jessi D. Hill, at Theatre Row. Set in an underfunded public school in Newark, Surely Goodness and Mercy tells the story of two friends who, against the odds, help each other ...