Steel Magnolias: Better when it’s breathing

I ran into a pal at intermission who floated a genius idea: cast Steel Magnolias with drag queens. Playwright Robert Harling is gay after all and the characters in Steel Magnolias feel very much like women as imagined by a gay man. In the play, we’re in small-town...

BEEP: Incoming

There’s nothing wrong with Beep. Designed by Australia’s Windmill Theatre for kids who are two to seven years old, it’s a simple story — told with puppets — about an outsider who is welcomed into village life. A furry little guy named Mort, who looks a lot like a...

Cipher: as in zero

A cipher can be a code. It can also be a zero. Cipher is a play about a code — and a play that adds up to very little. In Cipher, playwrights Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths invent a 63-year-old cold case. In that fictional mystery, a man’s body is found on the beach...

Straight White Men: Aliens

The motto of Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company is “Destroy the audience!” and the Village Voice has crowned her “the queen of unease”. But Itsazoo’s production of Lee’s Straight White Men left me disappointingly untroubled and unimplicated. In Straight White Men, which...

Anywhere But Here: Go there

Carmen Aguirre’s script for Anywhere But Here takes a long time to find its groove but, when it does, it’s thrilling. Really. Although I was ambivalent about the text after the first act, I rocketed out of my seat for the ovation at the end. And the production is...