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 paper, there […]
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 as […]
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 of the […]
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 Delacorte Theater […]
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 Controls” […]
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 “Young […]
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 not […]
Puppets! Puppets! Puppets!
by Frank Episale
Tom Lee’s Ko’olau. Puppets and direction by Tom Lee. At La Mama Experimental Theatre (closed).
Drama of Works’s 7th annual Carnival of Samhain. At HERE Arts Center through Nov. 8.
While puppet theatre probably makes up less than ten percent of the theatre I see, it makes up a much higher percentage of the memorable theatre I see. Year after year, […]
IT Awards Celebrate Fifty Years Off-Off Broadway
by Frank Episale
The notion of representing the entirety of Off-Off Broadway in a single awards ceremony is quixotic at best, but the Innovative Theatre (it) Awards, which held its fourth annual evening of festivities on September 22nd, attempts to do just that. To get a sense of the scope of the awards, consider that the nominees this year included […]
