Category: Off-Off Broadway
These Puppet Shows Aren't for Kids
By JONATHAN MANDELL
La MaMa kicks off a monthlong festival of provocative puppet productions
---
Food for the Gods is about the killing of black men; Exodus addresses the current refugee crisis; Blind is a solo work about disability. These may not sound like typical subjects for puppet shows, but little about the La MaMa Puppet Festival fits most audiences' preconceptions...
He Doesn't Design Sets, He Creates Environments
By JONATHAN MANDELL
Why Tony nominee Dane Laffrey completely reconfigured the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater for Lewiston/Clarkston
---
"You said you needed space; I gave you space," a drug-addicted mother tells her estranged gay son in Lewiston/Clarkston, two plays by Samuel D. Hunter presented as one evening at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. The mother's comment...
Don't Worry, You Get Safety Kits
By ELIZA BENT
Inside Cara Scarmack's examination of motherhood, isolation, the apocalypse and everyday weirdness
---
By the time I arrived at Cara Scarmack's some higher glimmer in our landscape of flat, presented by Buran Theatre at Collapsable Hole, I'd already traveled through three boroughs and was schlepping a very large to-go cup of soup. That turned out...
Wait, Didn't We Just Watch That Scene?
By ELIZA BENT
Inside David Greenspan's new time- and reality-bending play
---
The spark for The Things That Were There was ignited the night David Greenspan agreed to auction off his talents. The five-time Obie winner -- who's as lauded for his performing as his playwriting -- was participating in New Dramatists' signature fundraiser Nocturnal Commissions,...
What's New at the Revamped Fringe
By JONATHAN MANDELL
After a year hiatus, the New York International Fringe Festival returns with lots of changes
---
"New York City should have the best Fringe festival in the world -- and that's not what we had," says Elena K. Holy, the producing artistic director of the New York International Fringe Festival who helped found the event back in 1997. After its 20th edition...
Why You Need to Hear Anna Politkovskaya's Story Right Now
By JONATHAN MANDELL
The legacy of the late Russian journalist speaks directly to the turmoil of today
---
More than a thousand people attended the funeral of Anna Politkovskaya, a respected Russian journalist who was found murdered in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 2006. She was well known for investigating atrocities committed during her homeland's...
Can 'Antigone' Help Communities Heal?
By JOSE SOLÍS
Why Sophocles' play speaks to the Black Lives Matter movement
---
When Antigone in Ferguson opens this week, it will be the second Black Lives Matter-infused take on Sophocles' tragedy to play Harlem this year. But while Classical Theatre of Harlem's version was set in a politically charged dystopian future, Theater of War Productions' mounting tackles...
Black Survivors Matter
By JUAN MICHAEL PORTER II
Geraldine Inoa explores the traumatic aftermath of a police killing in Scraps
---
Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence after a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, there has been a rash of searing plays about how law enforcement victimizes African American men (Pass Over at Lincoln Center Theater, Kill Move Paradise...