TDF Stages Archive

Broadway Performers Playwrights By MARK BLANKENSHIP You Can't Take It With You is a wonderfully slippery play. You think you've got it nailed as a loopy comedy, and then it delivers a tender love scene. You're convinced it's breezy good time, and then it dismantles the fantasy of American success This complexity—this ability to be […]

Directors Tom Stoppard's characters are seldom at a loss for words, and the chatty creatures of Indian Ink are no exception, debating subjects of art, language, and empire. So it's striking that one of the first significant arguments in the play—originally written in the mid-1990s, and now making a belated New York debut at the […]

Playwrights By MARK BLANKENSHIP When you're writing a play about a real person, where do you start? At the day she's born? At the moment he becomes "significant?" The entry point not only dictates the shape of your script, but also underscores who you are as a playwright. Consider Lauren Gunderson's Bauer , now at […]

Directors Playwrights The Representatives are an underground theatre sensation — This week The Representatives — the most beloved theatre troupe you may not have heard of — stage their newest show, Of Orient Are . If you're in the mood for hyper-intimate, socially relevant comedy, leap into action; they only play through the weekend. But […]

Behind the Scene Circus Amok's latest show marks 25 years of public fun (with a message) — When my then-three-year-old first saw Jennifer Miller, she blurted out, "You're a girl with a beard!" It's an exclamation the Circus Amok founder has gotten used to hearing over the decades, whether she's onstage or off. A performer, […]

Susan Reiter covers dance for TDF Stages.

For a practical lesson in economics, try being hungry on Governors Island. The ferry ride to this lovely enclave is only $2—or completely free if you sail out early—and considering all the activities, views, and traffic-free silence the place offers, that's a spectacular deal. But if you don't bring your lunch, noontime might find you […]

Broadway Directors By MARK BLANKENSHIP Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth, now on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, begins with shenanigans. In 1982 a troubled kid named Warren gets kicked out of his house, so he steals $15,000 from his dad and scurries over to Dennis, his drug-dealing, narcissistic friend who lives by himself […]

Performers Building Character In some ways, Bootycandy i s a wild fantasy. Robert O’Hara’s latest play, now at Playwrights Horizons, just keeps breaking storytelling conventions, so that every time we think we understand it, it dodges and weaves. For instance, we might start with a sitcom-style scene about a little boy and his mother, but […]