Criticism

Rob Onorato on Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi.

Emma Wiseman on three “East Side Stories,” verbatim monologues at the Metropolitan Playhouse.

Jonathan Mandell on Belarus Free Theatre's Trash Cuisine, playing through May 17 at La Mama ETC in New York City.

David G. Garcia and Alma Itzé Flores on the 2015 revival of Culture Clash's Chavez Ravine at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, California. 

The author ruminates on two plays that recently concluded Off Broadway runs and their early development at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. 

The author on three musicals that have opened on Broadway this season, all descended from movie musicals that the MGM movie studio made in the Technicolor era. 

The author explores Company of Angels' workshop production of Dr. Morton's “heavy and psychedelic play.”

The author on The Kitchen's production of The Evening by Richard Maxwell. 

Frequent contributor Jonathan Mandell considers the current condition of theatre criticism and theatre critics.

George Brant’s Grounded, at Olney Theatre, is a fast-paced, suspenseful, and moving one-woman show about a drone operator’s struggle to play two roles: annihilator and mother.

Director Joanie Schultz talks to theatre critics and theatre artists about critic rating systems.

The author explores playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins adaptation of The Octoroon, called An Octoroon, and its depiction of race and gender onstage. 

Patricia Davis on House of Desires by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz produced in Spanish with English surtitles by GALA (Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos) Hispanic Theatre in Washington D.C. 

Ronee Penoi on Shear Madness, the longest running play in the American Theatre. 

The question from TEDxBroadway 2015: What ideas about theatre can we learn from people who may never have been inside one?

There is a sense that this piece somehow transcends theatre even as it embodies it—or, as Hamilton puts it: “This is not a moment, it’s a movement.”

Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B poses actors in tableau vivants that nod to 19th century human zoos, and Southwest African concentration camps. Patrick Gaughan charts the controversy around the show and his own experience of it. 

"Audience participation" is a vague term, like much of theatrical terminology; it has come to mean different things to different people... What happens when the audience participates by becoming performers—without volunteering to do so?

Airline Highway is about community. D’Amour focuses the play not on their pain, but on their joy and celebration of a life fully lived, using the “living funeral” as a landscape to highlight her nuanced characters and their complex relationships.

Sarah Orem explores the often-humorous way OCD is treated in mainstream film and television, and then shares three different examples of how theater treats the illness with honesty.

Are we free to gawk again? That’s what Broadway audiences are doing during the revival of The Elephant Man, one of several stage shows and television series that are bringing attention back to the freak show.

Though set in 1988, the play’s insistence on the power of words, creativity, and voice as a means of self-assertion, growth, and transformation is of timeless importance and is especially relevant now.

Based on interviews with local teachers and students about the current educational climate, Forgotten Futures creates space for discussion of the dysfunction plaguing Chicago Public Schools.

Carol Kearns writes about Zoetrope: Part 1, a drama set in 1951 Puerto Rico, looking at its multimedia aesthetic, bilingual presentation, and political themes.