TDF Stages Archive
An online theatre magazine
Read about NYC’s best theatre and dance productions and watch video interviews with innovative artists
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She’s Destroying My Career, But We’re Still Friends
By MARK BLANKENSHIP Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles You might assume that Tonya Pinkins focuses on the conflict in Rasheeda Speaking. After all, Joel Drake Johnson’s play, now in a New Group production at the Signature Center complex, basically turns a Chicago doctor’s office into […]
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A Simple Game With Terrible Consequences:
What starts as a simple game of dice explodes into rage, torture, and revenge in Shesh Yak, now at Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre. And it’s not because someone lost a bet. In Syrian-born writer/performer Laith Nakli’s new drama, Jameel (Zarif Kabier) invites Syrian expatriate Haytham (Nakli) to stay with him during a visit. The two are […]
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Can a Song Heal America’s Wounds?
By MARK BLANKENSHIP When Osceola Mays sings “Oh Freedom,” we can feel what it means to her. One of two characters in Texas in Paris, a play with music at the York Theatre Company, she’s a black woman in her 80s, the daughter of a Texas sharecropper, who suddenly finds herself singing for the French […]
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What’s Your Favorite Play Within a Film?
Welcome to Geek Out/Freak Out, where theatre fans get super enthusiastic about things. This week, Kelly Kerwin, an MFA Dramaturgy student at the Yale School of Drama, geeks out (via Google Doc) with Emily Zemba, a playwriting MFA student at Yale. Today’s Topic : What is your favorite play within a film? — Kelly Kerwin: […]
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Of Course His Arm Fell Off. He’s Sad.
By MARK BLANKENSHIP Of course Dash’s arm falls off. When you lose someone, it can feel like losing a limb, and in City Of, now at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in a Playwrights Realm production, feelings like grief (and love and hope) become physical facts. Dash, a man traveling to Paris in the wake […]
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WATCH: Meet Flux Theatre Ensemble
At Flux, everyone, including the audience, is part of the team.
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Brand New Song and Dance Man
By LAUREN KAY The most famous song and dance men—the Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys—are synonymous with debonair style, majestic movement, and a surplus of charm. And while the ranks of these elegant performers may have dwindled as tastes have changed, those nostalgic for swift-footed dancing and perfectly harmonized Gershwin tunes can enjoy the Encores! […]
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A Chinese Mystery, Film-Noir Style
By ERIC GRODE Move over, August Wilson. Damon Chua is halfway toward replicating your century-spanning theatre project. True, Chua doesn’t focus on one specific geographic area, à la Wilson’s beloved Hill District of Pittsburgh. And the definition of “century” got a little fuzzy when he set one of his plays in the 2000s. “Also, I […]
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All That Russian Passion in Just Two Hours
By MARK BLANKENSHIP Fans of Russian drama—or anyone who’s slogged through War and Peace-–might be startled to learn that Classic Stage Company’s current production of A Month in the Country lasts roughly 120 minutes. Since the original script for Ivan Turgenev’s 19th century comic romance can run nearly five hours, does that mean important moments have […]