Even This Square Loves Hair—Yes, the One Where They Get Naked
“Isn’t that the one where they take off their clothes?” Such was the response of multiple people when told this reviewer would cover Signature Theatre’s production of Hair, the psychedelic rock musical from the peace and love era. Hair is, indeed, famous—or infamous—for its controversial nude scene. When it premiered on Broadway in 1968, nudity…
Woolly’s Amm(i)gone Centers Faith and Family in Pre-Pride Performance
“What happens to the living when all our hopes and dreams are reserved for the afterlife?” It’s a question that has been mulled over, in one way or another, since the beginning of modern religion. And it emerges again as the guiding question in Amm(i)gone, a new play created and performed by Adil Mansoor and…
Spooky Action’s Frontiéres sans Frontiéres Is Satirical, Surreal, and Overwrought
Loud, pointedly delivered farts might seem out of place in a play about three stateless youths scrapping for their lives in an unnamed war zone, but they’re hardly the most absurd touch in Frontiéres sans Frontiéres. Phillip Howze’s play, now running at Spooky Action Theater under the guidance of artistic director Elizabeth Dinkova, uses just…
Distillation Takes Audiences on a Theatrical Journey That Continues After the Curtain Drops
Like many young adults working in the arts, Luke Casserly spent time at his childhood home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike many other young adults, he wrote a beautiful play about it. Distillation, Casserly’s taut, elegiac reminiscence about changing life in the Irish Midlands, amounts to far more than an amusing account of socially distant…
The Last Drop Takes You to the End of the World
Somewhere, 139 paces from the shore at low tide, near a tree stump, sits a still, an assemblage of sundry parts tended by Mary (Stacy Whittle) and Joe (Robert Sheire). The long-married couple, dressed in faded and threadbare clothing, seem to have divided the labor accordingly: Joe, who built the still, tends the fire, and…