Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. As written, Tornado is easy to relate to, with well-drawn characters, believable dialogue and a point to make about how people from different backgrounds misread each other. The play mirrors some of the divisions that beset our nation in a clear illustrative way. It eschews caricature and unneeded exposition while … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. In Scintilla, directed by Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, playwright Alessandro Camon wraps a dire message about climate change around the chasmal differences between a mercurial artist and her resentful adult son. Not nearly as gripping as Time Alone, his intense and poignant work about the impact of crime on the lives … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. Murder-by-cop. In Blue, playwright June Carryl lays out a blueprint for this grim, all-too-frequent horror show, building her story around a character who has taken the life of another human being and is struggling to justify this action both to himself and the person recording his take on events. The … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. In Manuel Puig’s stage play, Kiss of the Spider Woman, two fundamentally different personalities — a gay man accused of sexual relations with a minor, and a political prisoner-slash-macho straight guy working to overthrow a repressive regime — are housed together in a dingy cell with wretched food, dim lighting, … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. One of America’s most popular playwrights in the 1950s, William Inge drew on his childhood and youth in a small Kansas town for his incisive portrayals of life in the American Midwest. Inge eventually fell out of favor with critics and audiences alike, a decline precipitated in part by a … Read more
Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld. Tony-nominated playwright Lucas Hnath’s THE THIN PLACE is an eerie meditation on grief, regret and the need for closure, though it is undermined by the lack of a satisfying conclusion… Obie Award- and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning Hnath (“Red Speedo”; “A Doll’s House, Part 2”) carefully delineates each character with precise … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw. Paula Vogel’s play, How I Learned to Drive, knocked it out of the park for critical acclaim when it opened in 1997. Directed by Mark Brokaw at Manhattan’s Vineyard Theatre, the premiere featured Mary-Louise Parker as a woman recounting the pain of her teen and pre-teen years under the sway of … Read more
Terry Morgan – ArtsBeat LA. Plays in which family secrets are tragically revealed are nothing new – Oedipus and his mom were shocking audiences back as far as 429 BCE. In the U.S., the 500 lb. gorilla of this genre would be Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and the most influential of recent plays of … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw In 1960, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter were young playwrights whose work challenged theatrical convention and the expectations of critics and audiences. Both Albee’s brief two-hander, Fam and Yam, and Pinter’s lengthier one-act, The Dumb Waiter, received English language premieres that year — Albee’s at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway and Pinter’s at … Read more
Deborah Klugman – Stage Raw First produced with the title Gray’s Anatomy at New York’s Circle Rep Theatre in 1994, Jim Leonard’s family-oriented coming-of-age fable strives for the unvarnished poignancy of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as it recounts the story of a fatherless teen in 1880s rural Indiana. Leonard’s revised version, published as Anatomy of Gray in 2006 and currently directed … Read more