Populism Yea! Yea!
by Frank Episale
Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and […]
Most Happy “Fela”
by Frank Episale
When the reviews for the Broadway iteration of Fela! hit the stands (or, more accurately in my case, the RSS feeds), I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. Normally staid critics were breaking out the superlatives and the exclamation points by the bushel. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley opened his review by proclaiming that […]
Theatre Review: Greek to Me
by Frank Episale
Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center On […]
McCraney’s Mythologies
by Frank Episale
The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney, through Dec. 13th at the Public Theater. At 29 years old, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney has been crowned “a major new voice” by enough critics, directors, dramaturgs, and producers that there is already something of a backlash in the works. The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli recently dismissed McCraney’s success […]
Kings and Queens
by Frank Episale
County of Kings. Written and performed by Lemon Andersen. At the Public Theater. A Boy and His Soul. Written and performed by Colman Domingo. At the Vineyard Theater. I recently showed my students some clips of documentary and political theatre, including Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project and Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. One […]
Pubic Failures: The Bacchae and Othello at the Delacorte Theater
by Frank Episale
A great text, a major director, an accomplished design team, and a skilled cast performing in a beautiful outdoor theatre on a summer night in North America’s cultural capital: By all rights, this should have been one of my favorite evenings in the theatre. It wasn’t. JoAnne Akalaitis’s baffling and deeply unsatisfying production of The Bacchae in Central Park’s […]
Pull the String! Pull the String!
by Frank Episale
Puppet Kafka. Written by B. Walker Sampson. Directed by Gretchen Van Lente. Presented by Drama of Works, at Here Arts Center The instruction manual to the widely praised video game Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007) makes explicit comparison between control of the game’s avatar and the manipulation of puppets. A subsection of the manual titled “Contextual Puppeteering […]
Four Plays are Better than Some
by Frank Episale
“I don’t know how you do it, Frank. Every time I look out at the theatre scene in this city, all I see is a lot of crap.” This statement was part of an email I received last summer while trying to decide what I would write about for an upcoming article. When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors […]
“The Shipment” Delivers Uncomfortable Laughs
by Frank Episale
The Shipment. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street. A few days before Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment opened at The Kitchen last month, the playwright/director’s Facebook status read, “Young Jean needs to figure out how to get black audiences to The Shipment.” Five days later, she wrote […]
Anthems for Doomed Youth
by Frank Episale
Surrender. Conceived and directed by Josh Fox. Written by Josh Fox and Jason Christopher Hartley. Black Watch. Written by Gregory Burke. Directed by John Tiffany. Publicity materials for the The International WOW company’s Surrender, which closed in November but will return for a one-week engagement in January, point out that “99.5 percent of all Americans will […]
