Category: Playwriting
You're Supposed to Laugh, Then Cry
By REGINA ROBBINS
How Marcus Gardley reinvented Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba
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Back in 2010, The New Yorker's Hilton Als described playwright Marcus Gardley as "an interesting heir to García Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams." While any emerging dramatist would appreciate being likened to such theatrical giants, Gardley...
How Did James Baldwin Define Himself?
By JUAN MICHAEL PORTER II
Jewelle Gomez's new play examines the writer's dueling identities
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What do you do when what's oppressing you also nurtures and sustains you? In Waiting for Giovanni, playwright Jewelle Gomez examines James Baldwin's complicated relationship with the burgeoning civil rights movement while penning his 1956 novel Giovanni's Room. Though now considered...
Destruction and Rebirth in Coney Island
By MARTHA WADE STEKETEE
How Superstorm Sandy changed the trajectory of Fire in Dreamland
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Playwright Rinne Groff is obsessed with the obsessed, whether it's an inventor's struggle to perfect an early version of television (The Ruby Sunrise), an author's fixation on the story of Anne Frank (Compulsion) or an aspiring filmmaker's quest to make a movie about a historic catastrophe...
Where Do You Fit When You're Black, Queer and HIV Positive?
By JUAN MICHAEL PORTER II
Timothy DuWhite's Neptune has its world premiere at the HOT! Festival
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Throughout July, avant-garde hot spot Dixon Place hosts its annual HOT! Festival: The NYC Celebration of Queer Culture. Since 1992, HOT! has pushed the envelope of LGBTQ performance through eclectic programming that embraces a range of titillations, from good old-fashioned show...
Finding Current Comedy in an Old Tragedy
By JOSE SOLÍS
David Carl uses Shakespeare to skewer politicos in Trump Lear
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Late-night talk-show hosts write fresh bits every day to satirize the state of the union. But solo performer and playwright David Carl decided to poke fun at the current POTUS by going back to a 400-year old script: Shakespeare's King Lear. The result, Trump Lear, is much cleverer than...
How Much Do You Know About the Little Rock Nine?
By JOSE SOLÍS
Writer-director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj dramatizes a critical moment in our nation's history
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It's long been said that history is written by the winners. But when those victors are people of color, they often don't get to tell the heroic parts of their past. That may be why playwright Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj never heard about the Little Rock Nine...
How the 'Gay Play' Is Evolving
By JONATHAN MANDELL
Dramatists are exploring LGBTQ life in uncharted ways
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To judge only from Broadway, New York theatre is experiencing a Renaissance of old gay plays, with starry revivals of three landmark dramas that are now period pieces: The Boys in the Band from the '60s, the soon-to-open Torch Song from the '80s and Angels in America from the '90s.
But Pride...
Yes, There Were Gay Slaves
By REGINA ROBBINS
Playwright Donja R. Love explores queer love in the Civil War South
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In the opening scene of Sugar in Our Wounds, Donja R. Love's lyrical world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, a young plantation slave stands under a gigantic tree and hears it call his name: "James." That fantastical moment recalls the inception of the Civil War South-set play....