The two-year-old Actors’ Project Theatre Company is the first to admit that with Love’s Fire, it’s shamelessly cashing in on the current cachet of William Shakespeare. “He’s hip and young, but older crowds recognize him, too” says Irene Adjan, the company’s cofounder. But since the Bard-inspired theater piece — which…

If memory serves, Archie Bunker never ranted about brilliant country and western stars who experienced rapid career trajectories and died tragic deaths — possibly because none ever crossed his path. So it’s difficult to imagine what he’d think of daughter Gloria losing her head over Patsy Cline. Of course, more…

Suicide, abortion, death by torture, and plagiarism of an obscure British novelist are an awful lot to cram into a single play. In fact just one of these topics would be a challenge for the best of playwrights. Shakespeare’s potboiler Titus Andronicus, for example, contains rape, mutilation, and family squabbling,…

When you think of Sally Struthers, do you think of Saturday night on CBS during the ’70s? Or do you think of starving Third World babies? The star of stage, screen, and sincere-yet-strident infomercials has such a checkered resume that she’s never sure what people will say to her on…

In the GableStage production of Full Gallop, actress Judith Delgado reaches out and grabs the audience by the lapels. It’s a production that would simply thrill Diana Vreeland, whose obsession with clothing infuses this one-woman show just as her hyperbole-driven fashion sensibility filled the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue…

Early in Tom Stoppard’s comedy Rough Crossing, a character refers to the Irish policeman named Murphy who makes an entrance at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice. Don’t remember Murphy? You’re not alone. Never heard of Rough Crossing? You’re also in good company. The 1984 play by the coauthor…

When I asked the four-year-old next to me to explain the appeal of Snow White, she replied, “Seven beds. Seven bowls. Seven everything.” That theatergoer has probably never heard of Bruno Bettelheim, who deconstructed the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm some 20 years ago. She was entirely oblivious to…

If Sid Caesar had ever performed a sketch about Henry VIII, it might have resembled the hilarious second act of The King’s Mare, Oscar E. Moore’s bio-comedy about the Tudor monarch and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The entire play is now enjoying a high-spirited world premiere at Boca…

Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…

“It sure was a beautiful night,” says Jamie Tyrone, one of the two survivors in American theater’s most famous morning-after scene. “I’ll never forget it,” this drunk says to Josie Hogan, the woman who’s given him the only respite from misery he’s likely to get in this life. But, as…

William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of Homer’s Iliad. But would…

David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…

The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers together people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be…

Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans on stage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up…

At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore, this…

A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea — a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends –…

After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ to the asylum’s caretaker encased in a black box. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…

This is the season during which British playwright David Hare is printing his own currency on Broadway. In April the much ballyhooed The Blue Room, starring a naked Nicole Kidman, will be joined by a New York production of Amy’s View, featuring theater luminary Judi Dench. Soon after that Hare…

A woman in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile makes this comment about the famous painter: “He says that occasionally there is a ‘Picasso’ and he is him.” You can substitute the word genius for Picasso and get the sense of what this phrase means. The comedy appears to…

Imagine you’re watching an early play by an obscure playwright — say, a farce with a plot that’s difficult to take seriously. Perhaps it contains a case of mistaken identity, at least one sharp-tongued female character, and some confusion about the proper nature of marriage. Say the conflicts are resolved…