'Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Mandrake' at Quintessence

When the sum is greater than the parts

Together, Romeo and Juliet and The Mandrake are a treatise on desire: how it shapes our lives, how it brings out the best and worst in us, and how social appearance and responsibility can confound our hearts.

Mark Cofta

Oct 20, 2015 · Articles · 3 minute read

George & Co.'s 'Holden' at FringeArts

Holden holds on, provides no answers

In Holden, a theater piece devised by George & Co., the staging is expert, but portrays a condition more than a story.

Mark Cofta

Oct 19, 2015 · Articles · 2 minute read

'Auctioning the Ainsleys' at People's Light

A silly comedy

Like The Glass Menagerie, Auctioning the Ainsleys is about a dysfunctional family, but Laura Schellhardt’s play about memory presents these grown children in a comic light.

Frank Burd

Oct 19, 2015 · Articles · 3 minute read

Tyson and Jones in 'The Gin Game'

Ageism in the theater? Don't believe it

Cicely Tyson (90) and James Earl Jones (84) are acting up a storm on Broadway. And they’re not the only ones.

Carol Rocamora

Oct 19, 2015 · Articles · 3 minute read

Attis Theatre's 'Antigone' at the Wilma (second review)

From Greece with agony

The emotional scale of the Attis Theatre production of Antigone is outsized and overwrought, but that’s the nature of war and tragedy and the Greeks didn’t sugarcoat it.

Richard da Silva

Oct 17, 2015 · Articles · 4 minute read

Attis Theatre's 'Antigone' at the Wilma (first review)

What was before the beginning

It’s not often American audiences can experience the concentrated power of this kind of theater, which vitally restores to its earliest classics a sense of the force they must have had for their original audiences, while opening them, too, for our own secular, desacralized world.

Robert Zaller

Oct 17, 2015 · Articles · 5 minute read

Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced’ by Philadelphia Theatre Company (second review)

An overdue conversation

Does brutality lie just beneath the surface of civilization? Can we ever deny our heritage, or does it forever define us? And why do we need to hit women to express our rage?

Naomi Orwin

Oct 16, 2015 · Articles · 4 minute read

Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced’ by Philadelphia Theatre Company (first review)

Is there a therapist in the house?

Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s insightful and compelling drama of American Muslim anger, astutely mines the power of ancient prejudices but overlooks the countervailing power of human resilience.

Dan Rottenberg

Oct 15, 2015 · Articles · 5 minute read

'Shipwrecked! An Entertainment' by Donald Margulies

The lies we tell

Must everything be truth, or are we prepared to indulge fantastical stories just because they entertain? Or does believing fantasies sometimes have consequences?

Naomi Orwin

Oct 13, 2015 · Articles · 3 minute read

EgoPo's 'Children's Hour' by Lillian Hellman

A lie that is partially true

The issues at the heart of Lillian Hellman’s Children’s Hour still resonate today, 80 years after the play was first produced. But what matters more — the hint of illicit love, or the choice to live on one’s own terms instead of settling for marriage?

Naomi Orwin

Oct 13, 2015 · Articles · 4 minute read