New York Critic

At the center of the   The Mahabharata , one of the Hindu holy books, is The Bhagavad Gita , an epic of enormous proportions. At the core of the Gita is a dialogue between Prince   Arjuna and the god Krishna. Arjuna is expected to start a war to defend disputed land, but he hesitates. The god Krishna exhorts him to do his duty as a warrior and, finally, convinces him to attack. A mythical dialogue is unlikely material for a stage production, but playwright João Falcão has condensed it to an arresting hour-long, two-actor play called Dhrama: The Remarkable Dialogue Between Krishna and Arjuna . It presents the sort of mutual attempt at persuasion that we find in Man and Superman . The production comes from Brazil, presented in English. The production company is Tetris. The superb, masterful actors are Luca Bianchi (Arjuna), and Livia De Bueno (Krishna) playing the god traditionally represented as a man. The name Dhrama is derived from the Sanskrit word dharma ...

Fool’s Lear by Randy Neale produced by The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble directed by directed by Grant Neale with Grant Neale and Craig Smith Randy Neale’s play Fool’s Lear is a riff on King Lear . It shows us the king and his fool when they’re not on stage, in a dynamic dyad relationship. It’s a clever conceit, and quite well executed by The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. Neale has assimilated lines from Shakespeare (Lear’s great first speech), lines that sound like Shakespeare (“What brings my king to this barren and dangerous place?”) and a colloquial idiom (“They love their Daddy bunches and bunches.”). He even borrows from Julius Caesar for a moment. He manages to suggest Shakespeare without ever sounding pretentious. Grant Neale’s direction keeps everything moving and finely wrought. He keeps his two actors in a moment of Shakespearean wonder throughout the piece. His work as an actor is no less accomplished. He plays the Fool with a stammer, making him smart and dising...

Dogg's Hamlet , Cahoot’s Macbeth produced by The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble directed by Kevin Confoy Tom Stoppard has a talent for being clever and intellectual at once. In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth , he’s so clever and intellectual that he leaves us behind. The plays are so abstruse that they’re puzzling. Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth are companion plays, each a relatively short piece running about an hour. They show us a population who speak Dogg, a language that uses the same words as English but with meanings unrelated to the meanings we assign to them. Presented first, Dogg’s Hamlet is concerned with Dogg-speaking people producing Hamlet , and we see many of the scenes from Shakespeare. Much is made of their building a wall and the words they use to build it. The play itself is delivered in familiar Shakespearean English (Stoppard had referred to Hamlet in that earlier, more famous, play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ) . A delivery man...

Charlotte’s Song by Nancy Ferragallo directed by Andreas Robertz and Mario Golden produced by The Theater for the new City Charlotte’s Song is a stark expressionist piece, written – ‘conceived’ would be a better word – by Nancy Ferragallo. This bit of concept theater concerns a schizophrenic mother and her daughter. The play proceeds largely through monologues, and also through dance, on a nearly bare stage. Mother and daughter communicate, for the most part, through letters. Or at least, the parent does; her daughter does not necessarily respond. A large portion of the piece consists of monologues in which the mother, reading her own letters, begs her daughter to visit her at a series of hotels. In fact, the litany of hotels is extensive. The use of repetition is effective only up to a point. In this case it’s fascinating at first, but becomes burdensome. Long expressive silences are imbedded in the spoken passages. Framed by fragments of the monologue, they’re eerie....

Mark Borkowski’s so-called comedy The Head Hunter is about a mobster who decapitates people, and his cousin, a writer who’s been cheated out of a screenplay. It’s been produced recently by Termination Productions.  The action takes place in the writer’s apartment. The tough-guy cousin is determined to convince his kin to let him handle the problem with the screenplay his own way. As he is a mobster who  decapitates people, you can imagine what that is. There’s potential here. During the course of the play the unsavory relative reveals some pretty alarming secrets to his nice-guy cousin. Unfortunately, Borkowski has loaded the play with such a virulent string of obscenities that it’s obscured beneath a blanket of vulgarity. It gets tolerably better after the intermission, when there’s at least some interesting dramatic action. By that time Borkowski has essentially exhausted the lexicon of smut. The Head Hunter is served better than it deserves by the other tale...

Don Juan or the Wages of Debauchery by Vit Horejs produced by The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre Don Juan or the Wages of Debauchery is an adaptation of the Don Juan myth by The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. The company produced it recently with beautiful, superbly painted puppets designed by Jakub “Kuba” Krejci. They have exquisite, detailed costumes by Michelle Beshaw. They range from a few inches high to one or two feet. The master of the puppet company is Vit Horejs, a Czech puppeteer who wrote the adaptation, directed the show, and “plays” the puppet role of Don Juan. Horejs’ work springs from traditional Czech puppetry, but he’s developed the form into something more complex and contemporary. Horejs is joined by four other puppeteers. The puppet stage is the traditional clothed platform with a series of backdrops. The puppeteers, in costume, are seen above backdrops. They’re acting from the waist up – or shoulders up – their faces express...

Tosca and the Two Downstairs by Franca Valeri directed by Laura Caparrotti with Laura Caparrotti Marta Mondelli from Kairos Italy Theater and Dicapo Opera presented in Italian with English supertitles Spoiler alert ! Tosca and the Two Downstairs is an enormously creative piece from the Kairos Italy Theater, written by Franca Valeri. This two-character drama is set during the action of Tosca ; it’s a spoken piece, not sung, the action of which takes place while the second act of the opera is going on offstage. After an amusing little opening scene, we meet Emilia at the Palazzo Farnese, where she is porter. The play’s exposition consists of her describing the people around her (who are the characters from the opera) to her offstage husband. The two are in the service of Scarpia (the villain of the opera), to whom Emilia is devoted. Iride enters, wife to Sciarrone (he’s straight from the opera as well). Scarpia is chief of police and Sciarrone, also an unsavory c...

Pseudolus The Onomatopoeia Theatre Company off-off-Broadway directed by Thomas R. Gordon with   Miranda Webster Sarah Hegarty Plautus lived around the year 100 BC, his comedies are some of the earliest examples of Roman literature we have. One of the best known is Pseudolus . The play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was based in part on this play. Pseudolus is an example of comedy about the clever slave, in this case Pseudolus, naturally a role written for a man but played here by an actress, Miranda Webster. Pseudolus connives to get some money so that the son of his master can buy the slave girl he loves from her master, also naturally a role written for a man but played here by an actress, Sarah Hegarty. Naturally, by the end of the play Pseudolus succeeds in getting the money for the girl, but only after some pretty crafty work and some pretty complicated plot turns. The Onomatopoeia Theatre Company has just staged Pseudolus in a passable prod...

Capt. Smith Goes to the Ukraine from the Yara Arts Group At La MaMa Directed by Virlana Tkacz Bob Holman Susan Hwang Julian Kytasty The story from the early 1600’s of John Smith and the native American woman Pocahontas is iconic Americana. The native chief sentences him to execution; Pocahontas intercedes and saves him. Smith was quite the adventurer. He also seems to have been quite taken with himself. He recorded his life in the first autobiography in English, The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa and America from Anno Domini 1593 to 1629 . Before Smith embarked for Virginia – who would have guessed? – he fought the Ottoman Turks and was enslaved. He was taken across the Black Sea to his owner’s mistress, to escape to Ukraine. Capt. John Smith Goes to the Ukraine , from the Yara Arts Group, is based on the account of this adventure his The True Travels book, and some of its passages are quoted verbatim. For ...

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen from The Young Vic, London At The Brooklyn Academy of Music Directed by Carrie Cracknell February 2014 There’s no play more iconic the Ibsen’s A Doll’s House . It wasn’t the first modern drama, but it announced modern drama with unprecedented volume and insistence. It confronted Europe with theater as revolutionary. If Ibsen had written nothing but Doll’s House , his position theatrical paterfamilias (aka “T he Father of Modern Drama”) would still be assured. Doll’s House concerns a monumental simp – Nora –   to whom her husband, Torvald, condescends to an epic degree. What he doesn’t know is that years earlier she forged her father’s signature to get a loan that would help him (he doesn’t even know about the loan). She’s been paying it back through scrimping and saving on her own allowance. Today the lender shows up to blackmail her. She believes that when her husband learns what’s happened he’ll take responsibility for it – but in...