For playwrights, family dramas are never just about families.
Theater
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
The great message of ‘Our Town’: Nostalgia and regret come with age. So do grace and compassion.
Good theater draws us into its few hours of seeming reality, but it is most effective when it speaks to our lived reality.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Three new shows break the mold of the jukebox musical—for better and for worse
Three new Off-Broadway shows don’t just show us what draws musicians to their chosen medium; they make us hear it, with often bracing effect.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Stephen Sondheim’s final musical is a satisfying cap to an extraordinary career
Sondheim has left the building, and he lives on only in interpretation and iteration, no less than Shakespeare or Mozart.
Posted inPolitics & Society, Short Take
Pro-life playwrights exist. The Dramatists Guild just doesn’t seem to think so.
I was saddened but not surprised by the pro-abortion position of the dramatists guild.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: August Wilson, a playwright of multitudes
In ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ an excellent new biography by Patti Hartigan, we read of the winding path that led Wilson to his ascendance, then delves into the tumults and triumphs of his two decades at the heights of achievement.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Take me to church (or to Broadway): ‘Purlie Victorious’ and the catharsis of Black theater
Can I get an amen?
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
‘Dead Man Walking’: An operatic exploration of Sister Helen Prejean’s death row ministry
“Dead Man Walking” is a deeply human story about truth, forgiveness and the possibility of redemption. It is a journey into which everyone—from the singers to the audience—is invited.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Playwright Annie Baker offers a theology of pain in her new play ‘Infinite Life’
For theater fans, the arrival of a new Annie Baker play is cause for celebration.
Posted inArts & Culture, Theater
Tony winner ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is the ‘Ted Lasso’ of Broadway
“Kimberly Akimbo” is about two young people who have an incredibly hopeful perspective on life. But it’s also quietly about childhood trauma.