New York Critic

A la Carte: A Feast of New Plays Presented by Workshop Theater Company directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby One-act plays can be terrific. Drama, after all, demands compression. They can be great, and when they’re bad, well, at least they’re only one act. Workshop Theater Company (OOB) has served up a buffet of one-acts in A la Carte: A Feast of New Plays . It’s a program of a half-dozen short plays loosely connected by images of food. The quality of the scripts runs from very nice to merely standard, but the evening enjoys some satisfying acting. One of the better plays – the first in the program and the longest – is The Cook and the Soldier by Allen Knee. It concerns a young girl, Molly (played by Tess Frazer), and a veteran named Tom who went AWOL by stealing the identity of a dead photographer (played by Joe Boover). The writing is delicate and stylistically very good, working largely through character revelation. The relationship develops from a bump-into-each-other m...

My Technology Presented by Deena Levy Theatre Studios Conceived and directed by Deena Levy Personal monologues – that is, autobiographical monologues – are tough to pull off. They need to work without drama. They need to be so personal that they’re universal. We need to like the actor, to identify with them, and to see our own faults in them. My Technology , presented by Deena Levy Theatre Studio, is a set of nine of this sort of monologue, revolving around technology and its effect on our personal life (although in truth some of them touch on technology only in passing). The best monologue, which is very good and the only one that works for us, is Danny Patrick’s piece Deaf Man Crossing . Mr. Patrick was in a coma for 12 days after a bar fight. When he woke he had lost most of hearing. The pacing of his work is very nice; we have the time to relate to what he’s saying and to care about him. There are particularly welcome moments when he relates talking to his grandmother,...