KENNETH JONES

The show – which follows the 18th-century travails of the European banking family – suggests walls between husband and wife, walls between generations, and looming most large, walls surrounding the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, where Mayer Rothschild aspires to wealth and inspires his five sons to chase international success.

The three main characters of Sylvia , A.R. Gurney’s comedy famous for its love triangle of a Manhattan couple and their newly adopted dog, travel in a kind of pack. Trekking through conflict and crisis, they sniff out their story together, seeking a family.

“The design was a direct result of a very strong visceral response to the material,” she says. “With other projects, I tend to go through a lot more storyboarding, collaging and research — a kind of forensic process where I try to have the design reveal itself. This really came about as an endless emotional response.”

That’s because Fight or Flight is a troupe of trapeze-loving actors who are gleefully mounting a comic, movement-friendly stage version of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating shark.

King Liz pushes the gender boundaries in sports

Keeping an ear to the ground to listen for societal shifts is an essential part of the theatremaking process for director-playwright Michael Perlman, whose Off-Broadway play At the Table, now at HERE Arts Center in a production from Fault Line Theatre, takes the pulse of a group of culturally eclectic friends in their thirties. Just […]

The unlikely life of the new comedy An Act of God  — In the beginning, there was the Producer. Or so sayeth playwright David Javerbaum, who credits Jeffrey Finn as the primary shepherd behind An Act of God, the  Broadway adaptation of Javerbaum’s 2011 humor collection The Last Testament: A Memoir by God. “It had […]

Inside the creation of Broadway musical It Shoulda Been You — Musical theatre songwriters have been known to drive themselves crazy seeking suitable source material for shows. They rack their imaginations, plunder public-domain literature titles, ask studios for rights to movie scripts, and track down playwrights or their heirs. It was somewhat easier for composer […]

The fascinating silence of Small Mouth Sounds — When she signed up for a wellness retreat in upstate New York a few years back, playwright Bess Wohl had no idea she was laying the groundwork for a future play. She also had no idea that the program required a vow of silence. “That was news […]