The ambitions of these two comedies could hardly be more disparate, yet the craft employed in both is rooted in similarly precise calibrations of our attention and sympathies.

Three strong new revivals offer an instructive comparative lens through which to view the form’s development over the decades. 

In these Lenten and Easter days in which the church celebrates a man whose divinity was revealed in his willingness to sacrifice everything for love, consider "Sweeney Todd" to be that story’s dark, demonic twin.

A lovingly crafted new revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music makes a fresh case for reconsideration of Lorraine Hansberry's less well-known second play, which followed the classic “A Raisin in the Sun.”

As ever, Stephen Adly Guirgis writes hilarious, profane dialogue and puts his characters in contention over matters both petty and portentous.

“Downstate,” Bruce Norris’s new off-Broadway play about a group home for pedophile, raises the question: Who gets to write about pedophilia? And what are they allowed to say?