Performers

Phoenixdoesn’t sound like the funniest play. The show, which is now at Cherry Lane Theatre, opens with a nurse named Sue (Julia Stiles) confronting a laid-back dude named James (James Wirt) just a few weeks after their one-night stand. Turns out she’s pregnant—whoops—and she’s not planning to keep the baby. And oh yeah, after this, […]

Although the Peccadillo Theater Company’s new comedy Drop Dead Perfect sends up a wide range of American cultural touchstones—from The Glass Menagerie to I Love Lucy to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? —its greatest inspiration is arguably the high-camp, cross-dressing work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. As with Ludlam classics like The Mystery of Irma Vep , Drop Dead Perfe

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles

“ Once happened at this perfect juncture where I really needed this show and I really needed this group of people,” he says. “I was on the fence about whether I even wanted to stay in New York. Whether I even wanted to keep trying my hand at being an actor.”

And while it’s rare enough for an actress to land such a major part, Faure’s journey to top billing has been especially unusual: Most recently, she left the ensemble of Bullets Over Broadway to start her new job, a swift exit that certainly wasn’t part of her plan: Last year, she says, “when I was in Honeymoon in Vegas at Paper Mill Playhouse, I knew it might have a Broadway life at some point, an

Patrick Fitzgerald finds new life in Sea Marks —

Inside the development of the ambitious new musical —

— Brooklyn-based playwright and performer Oni Faida Lampley always used her personal life for inspiration. So when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37 in 1996 (in the midst of nursing her infant child and on the cusp of her first significant movie role in Lone Star ), it was almost inevitable that she would write about it.