Review: A Powerful Staging Of Jean-Paul Sartre's NO EXIT Takes Center Stage At The Off-Central Players
by Drew Eberhard
- Nov 10, 2023
No Exit is an Existentialist French play from 1944 written by Jean-Paul Sartre. The play had its first performance at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier in May of the same year. Sartre’s inception of the play centered around this idea of the look and the ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness or “other person.” Conceptualizing and rationalizing the idea of how we perceive ourselves, versus the mirror image of how society or those in close proximity perceive us to be.
Review: David Mamet's REVENGE OF THE SPACE PANDAS OR BINKY RUDICH AND THE TWO SPEED CLOCK at Off-Central Players
by Drew Eberhard
- May 15, 2023
Mamet’s full-length comedy penned to appeal to young audiences premiered in 1978 at the Town Hall Performing Arts Center in Flushing, Queens a borough of New York City.
The plot is messy, convoluted, and at some times almost mind-warping. The story follows the adventures of Binky Rudich, his friend Vivian Mooster and an almost human-like sheep Bob as they struggle to get the two-speed clock to work. Soon, Binky’s mother known as Mrs. Rudich calls for Binky to come down for lunch, Binky decides to hit the clock with a hammer one last time hoping to make it work. Suddenly the kids have blasted nearly 50 lightyears away from anything they’ve known to the planet of Crestview.
Review: Caryl Churchill's A NUMBER at Studio Grand Central
by Drew Eberhard
- Nov 13, 2022
A Number written by British Playwright Caryl Churchill first premiered in September of 2002 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England. The play starred Michael Gambon in the role of Salter, and Daniel Craig in the role of Bernard (Et al.). Under critical reception, Churchill’s play was lauded for its use of “significant intellectual depth while imploring an effective economy of style.” Told in a series of five vignettes, the story is set in the near future, where a relationship/conflict between father and sons comes to a head when conflict about the use of human cloning becomes the topic of conversation. The play expresses the deeply divided differences between nature vs. nurture, and the idea that “if we had a do-over, could we atone for our mistakes?”
In an article for the New York Times, Ben Brantley described Churchill’s work as, “stunning” and a “gripping dramatic consideration of what happens to autonomous identity in a world where people can be cloned.”
LAB Theater Project Presents THE ABBEY OF THE HOLY LONESOME
by Stephi Wild
- Oct 5, 2022
LAB Theater Project will present the world premiere of The Abbey of the Holy Lonesome, by Andra Laine Hunter. The play is a spooky but lyrical tale of longing and repression, enchantment and treachery, told with a poetic sensibility and a finely crafted sense of its isolated, back-woods location.
Review: SELINA FILLINGER'S SOMETHING CLEAN at Studio Grand Central
by Drew Eberhard
- Aug 12, 2022
These questions and more are the thoughts that fill my mind upon exiting the theatre following the opening night of Studio Grand Central’s Second Season opener Something Clean by Selina Fillinger. Fillinger whose more recent work Potus is a smashing success on Broadway; penned this three-hander piece about a grieving mother who also is struggling with love and culpability. Her own struggle with intimacy is backlogged by trauma and has come to a crippling head not just on her inner self but on her marriage as well.
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