‘True West’: Sam Shepard’s Super Smash Brothers
In a Roundabout revival of the nearly 40-year-old play, it holds up as a withering portrait of the myths and traps of American masculinity.
Critic’s Notebook
Festival Roundup Part Deux: Not Our First Rodeo
It wasn’t quite the season of our discontent, but this year’s January festivals felt a bit less binge-able than usual, despite the high points.
What One Show Can Carry: William Kentridge’s ‘The Head and the Load’
To honor the million-plus Black Africans who died in World War I, the South African artist uses opera, theatre, dance, video, and a dose of Dada.
All ‘The Season’ in a Day: Reading Goldman to Say Goodbye
You can’t just dip into the best, most compulsively readable book ever written about the art and sweat of making theatre (though you may skip a few parts).
Everything’s Different, Nothing’s Changed: ‘Company’ With a Female Bobbie
By flipping a few genders, Marianne Elliott’s new London revival turns Sondheim and Furth’s classic into a meditation on modern relationships.
‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ and the Female Storyteller
In her boundary-breaking, civically engaged play, Heidi Schreck shows that a woman telling her story is a political, and powerful, act
‘Oklahoma!,’ Still Okay?
Two new revivals—one ebulliently LGBTQ, another brooding and immersive—make this musical warhorse run in new directions.
The Shaw Festival’s Welcome Wagon
Under a.d. Tim Carroll, Niagara-on-the-Lake’s company honors its namesake with new work, complementary programming, and even—zounds!—a Shakespeare.
A Gay ‘Inheritance’ That’s Generations in the Making
Matthew Lopez’s two-part epic uses E.M. Forster as a template and is playing in London, but this sweeping, imperfect play is unmistakably American.
In With the New at Oregon Shakes
By doing such vital work by living playwrights, this classical destination theatre with Shakespeare in its name effectively puts them on equal footing with the Bard.
