Plays

It takes a rare kind of playwright to evoke the head-spinning contradictions in our national political psyches.

“I asked my students for the image of the essence of tenderness. One girl brought in a small, silver plate with a bunch of grapes neatly laid out on it. When I noticed she had stripped the skin off the grapes, I got goose bumps.”

A play that updates European absurdist techniques to take aim at liberal America’s great existential troubles: race and gender.

”I am not a human being up there, true, and I am not a woman. I’m consciousness.”

“One is constantly working over what happened and constructing the future based on the past. So there’s no way of saying now we’re done with the past and it’s time to look for our future. No, there’s a direct continuity between these things.”

Tom Noonan on plays becoming movies, musicians becoming actors, and fantasy becoming reality.

In a new staging of Amiri Baraka’s one-act play, the audience and performers alike are tasked with endurance.

David Greenspan’s plays are at once grotesque and beautiful; they pontificate on meta-theater and self-consciousness, while remaining familiar and intimate.

“I went through a period in my twenties when I really resented the pressure to be happy that I felt from my parents and from the world at large, because aspiring to be happy doesn’t always lead to the most interesting life.”

The writing is on the wall in Annie Baker’s reimagining of Uncle Vanya at the Soho Rep.

“All art aspires toward music, so I try, as far as I can, to make a symphony out of the language.”

Emerald Pellot speaks with playwright Mariah MacCarthy about the writer’s latest play: Ampersand: A Romeo and Juliet Story, part of FringeNYC.

Belgian director and playwright Jan Lauwers of Needcompany in discussion with fellow dramatist Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group on the parallel lives of their respective companies and the upcoming performance of The Deer House at BAM.

Jefferson describes Bradshaw’s plays as treacherous territories peopled with high-achieving suburbanites and professors gripped by sexual and racial manias. Their most dangerous quality: they act on pure id.

I didn’t grow up going to the theater, so plays for me were instructions for imagining (or also, I gathered, enacting) bizarre performance events, and curious printing practices had arisen to reproduce this unwieldy information.

“That question is not about the character that’s written on the page there. That question is about you. There’s a kind of compulsion when you’re acting to make it believable, to make it credible. That’s not my concern. That’s going to happen. Whatever happens will be real. It will be real in some fashion.” 

When asked what his plays were about, Harold Pinter once famously and facetiously replied that they were all about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.”

“I worked at Shepherd-Pratt mental hospital, and I liked to take my name tag off and maybe be confused for one of the patients.”

Wallace Shawn’s Traveler is sick with fever, wedged between the sink and the toilet in an unnamed hotel located in an undisclosed country after a civil war. Borges’s time labyrinth imbues the atmosphere;