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
Performers 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 […]
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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 […]
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Can a Song Heal America’s Wounds?
Songwriters 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 […]
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What’s Your Favorite Play Within a Film?
Geek Out Freak Out 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 […]
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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 […]
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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
Off-Broadway Songwriters 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 […]
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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 […]