Helen Shaw

The same Adam Bock who has been announced for Second Stage’s upcoming season?

Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for this www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"Open" first opened at the Tank in 2019, and the terror of the present moment sharpens the play: the fear the Magician feels at expressing queerness seems all too reasonable, given the lengths so many are taking these days to make her love ... disappear. (Thru the 27th) wptheater.org/wp-space-pro...

The Magician tells us about her girlfriend, and the women's love story, threaded through the cracks of the illusionist's monologue, grows dark. It's a daring tactic, to make the Magician seem like a flop-sweating try-hard, then to turn our embarrassed discomfort into dawning horror and pity (3/4)

Hill can feel like a performer from another age—she is an expert in a broad, silly, wild-eyed delivery that can make her seem like a sitcom neighbor from the '80s, one who might have started out as a carnival barker. But her character is also terribly, terribly sad (2/4)

A woman dressed as a magician in a sparkly frock coat gestures magnificently

Crystal Skillman's monologue "Open," starring the great Megan Hill, is a magic act with no magic in it--a woman, the Magician, boasts about the illusions she's doing in front of us (bird, rings, flowers, PRESTO!) but nothing actually appears on the empty stage (1/4)

YouTube video by SanFrancisco Native The Gospel at Colonus

That production has been my touchstone ever since I saw the video....my father used it in his classes to teach Sophocles, heaven only knows how he got it. This was before we had a VCR, I think youtu.be/8ZyQP_zrD2U?...

YouTube video by Release - Topic Numberless Are the World's Wonders (Live)

Gospel at Colonus on Little Island is sold out except for standing room, but you can always shore up your disappointed spirit with this, Bob Telson's stunning setting of the finest of all Sophocles' choruses.
Numberless are the world's wonders/but none more wonderful than man youtu.be/TiTc8O__9Mw

Where Are the Women? New Theater Season Announcements Signal a Troubling Setback I’ve been writing about the lack of female representation in creative teams for at least 15 years. When I wrote a series on female playwrights a couple of years back, there was a sense that things wer...

Such an odd series of season announcements—one alone wouldn't have raised eyebrows, but it certainly looks like a trend when taken together (CSC, Roundabout, Williamstown, Playwrights Horizons) www.broadwayworld.com/article/Wher...

YouTube video by American Repertory Theater Diana Oh's Clairvoyance

Diana Oh: Rest in peace, rest in power, rest in song, rest in flow youtu.be/RZmV6_1j1xk

Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar Since leaving “Top Chef,” Lakshmi has found herself in a period of professional uncertainty. What better time to try standup comedy?

Yooooo I just won a James Beard Award for my profile of Padma Lakshmi from last year! www.newyorker.com/culture/prof...

All about when to disobey, when to think, when to act with deliberation, how to listen for the moment when the command chain goes sour

Mission Impossible borrowed from so many older better, movies—e.g., Fail-Safe, which led me to By Dawn's Early Light, which...is amazing? Rebecca DeMornay, James Earl Jones and Martin Landau try to stop an ongoing hot war, never flagging even when a braggadocious fool gets the nuclear codes

A really wonderful play by Ariel Stess—Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda—just won the Yale prize, chosen by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Absolutely super and appropriate choice: there’s a deep link btw Purpose’s monologues and Stess’s storytelling, a return to literary gorgeousness and patience

A red stage curtain and two men chatting—one popping his head through the curtain, the other looking apologetic, with papers in his hand. The text below it reads "Seagull: True Story —May 16-June 1"

After a killer 1st act, they appear less in the 2nd, which costs the show some circus energy—it's hard to dramatize eroding confidence. Still, designer Alexander Shishkin creates impressive low-budget spectacles, as does Molochnikov, a serious talent, knocked back by circumstance, but not down. 5/5

Zafir, wearing a sports coat and beige trousers, swings in on a rope while people in black try to do serious theatre behind him

Actors lined up at a curtain call, including, center, Andrey Burkovskiy, a tall man in a black bowtie and red jacket

The show has 2 driving forces: Elan Zafir's Anton, a sidekick and sad-eyed joker, & the hilarious MC (Andrey Burkovskiy), part Bulgakovian devil, part NY producer ("Fantastic!" he shouts, never committing a penny), part Trigorin, part what happens if you hire Russian Ed Grimley as your narrator. 4/5

A man startles awake on his inflatable mattress, as a nightmare vision of Putin (Andrey Burkovskiy, with his shirt off, riding a "horse" made out of four actors) points a finger-gun at him

A red curtain closes on a red-painted stage. In the gap between the curtains, there's a green column from the subway, with its sign for "Broadway-Lafayette", and a man in a red jacket in waving to (or pushing?) someone, but the curtain prevents us from seeing which

Amid fairground nightmarishness—half Blok, half Lynch—Kon struggles with censorious actors & a producer in love with his Nina. The visuals are hilarious (Putin pops by) & horrifying (A subway platform materializes around Kon and we remember how Chekhov's Konstantin acts after he feels forgotten) 3/5

Kon (Eric Tabach) and his friend Anton (Elan Zafir), wear big furry Russian hats, gossip and laugh in Red Square, which is represented by three actors wearing huge models of Kremlin towers

The plot combines "Seagull" and Molochnikov's own exile: successful director (Kon), a LGBTQ-friendly avant-gardist, flees Moscow when Putin's crackdown stops him from working freely. In New York, though, all his fame evaporates. Can he even put on a show? A rich city assures him it has no money 2/5

Actors declaim on a dark stage; behind and above them, a man on a ladder waves a huge sheet of blue-lit plastic as if he's flapping gigantic wings

Seagull: True Story by Eli Rarey, dir. by Alexander Molochnikov, produced by En Garde Arts @ La Mama, is a grotesque carnival, exploring parallels between Russia's murderous repressiveness & U.S. anti-art callousness. Both expect artists to dance, while the Big Boys laugh & throw pocket change 1/5

The list of San Francisco theatres lost at the end of this article is awful to read…

One of my favorite shows last year was Ariel Stess's KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA, and this week's sharpest plays come from that killer cast: Zoë Geltman (Miranda) has A(u)nts @ the Brick, and Dana (Emma) is back at the Tank. That Stess prod is going to be like the Sex Pistols show in 1976....

Four high school students sit on a red carpet with a chalkboard behind them; in the front, a girl in plaid shirt and engineer boots seems to be saying something urgently, and the other three stare at her, hypnotized

Agree 💯 with Sara's rec of Lobster, Kallan Dana's A+ highschool comedy-turned-drama.... young Nora (Cricket Brown!!) stages Patti Smith & Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth with fellow students who struggle to channel the original's chthonic ambition. The Tank 'til 5/17... www.vulture.com/article/what...

It's thrilling, though, to learn Geltman—a comic sparkler in plays like "Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda"—is such a serrated satirist, and that Sirna-Frest is such a precise directorial match for the material. All in all, it's a perfect summer cocktail: Light, breezy, sour, sad. 5/5

Everyone excels here, including Jiaying Zhang, whose prop design includes a magical glass of chard. (Young finds it in her purse during a bravura solo bar scene.) Sirna-Frest nails the show's early farce rhythms though the show slows after the first hour, and a surreal ending sort of sidles away 4/5

Between scenes, something chitters in the dark; the women's shadows seem to have too many legs...or antennae. Even before going full Kafka, Geltman allegorizes our world in terms of a eusocial colony, where non-child-bearing ants obey their pheromonal programming to do crucial nurturing labor. 3/5

...where their hilarious overlapping conversation—Geltman is a master of this—obscures a jolly sense of resignation. Each aunt (reluctantly or not) takes care of kids in their family; each is rarely thanked, rarely heard. Such plucky self-reliance baffles a world that depends on it all the same 2/5

A(U)NTS! at The Brick, written by Zoe Geltman and directed by Julia Sirna-Frest, is a dropped icecream cone of a play: sweet & sticky & a lil bit...infested. It starts as a workplace comedy about 3 single aunts (Jehan O. Young, Geltman, and cannonball Megan Hill), working in a medical office...1/5

Richard Foreman alert! Andrew Lampert has curated a series at Anthology Film Archives...rarities onscreen from May 21-28. (NB: On May 24, the "lost" doc by Berenice Reynaud, Pavane for a Missing Play, about a piece RF canceled late in its development...) www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screeni...

Richard Kind Is the Perfect Second Banana The inveterate character actor discusses Don Quixote, his time as George Clooney’s roommate, and his latest gig: m.c.ing John Mulaney’s absurdist talk show.

My gift to mothers today is a long chat with Richard Kind. We met, naturally, at Fairway, and talked about Harold Hill, Studio 54, his skin condition, his love of Don Quixote, the time that George Clooney threw pies at him, and more. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67

A painful, sudden loss www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/a...