Helen Shaw — Theater Critic

Now, I am a big old scaredy-cat, and I did plenty of arm-clutching (sorry, neighbor to my left!) during “Paranormal Activity.” Yet the sense of release that follows horror of this kind might not only be the relief of having survived the jump scares. There’s also a strangely comforting suggestion that in a world where evil doers seem beyond the reach of justice, something is watching. If it’s hard to see for now, that’s only because it’s waiting to make the sinners pay.

I was occasionally impatient with the production, but that feeling has dissolved as time has gone by. The more I realized that Serio and Weiler had diverted me with teenage drama from an adult horror beneath, the more I admired the 90 minutes I spent at the Atlantic. This may be a play that needs to be considered twice. And, anyway, that’s what a certain savior would say, right? It is better to live through some sorrows a second time, knowing what’s to come.

Smith has written about young people in extremis before: Her “Grief Camp” at Atlantic Theater Company dealt with bereaved children having a good time, often in spite of their own fluctuating will. This play, though, feels like an advance. Her naturalistic dramatic voice — a still-sticky adolescent mixture of wild feeling and zoned-out alienation — comes into better focus here, thanks to the loose, swaggering realism generated by the director, Chloe Claudel.

*CRITIC'S PICK* Smith has written about young people in extremis before: Her “Grief Camp” at Atlantic Theater Company dealt with bereaved children having a good time, often in spite of their own fluctuating will. This play, though, feels like an advance. Her naturalistic dramatic voice — a still-sticky adolescent mixture of wild feeling and zoned-out alienation — comes into better focus here, thanks to the loose, swaggering realism generated by the director, Chloe Claudel.

But the Delacorte’s huge outdoor stage needs a director more comfortable with staging action and group scenes - for “Romeo and Juliet,” in which Verona’s warring houses play a crucial role, unsteadiness in handling the ensemble is fatal. And the emotional stuff just goes thud. When Juliet awakens in her family crypt to find her young husband dying as he leans over her, for instance, we lose several of that excruciating scene’s key beats. It’s a pretty famous moment, when she stabs herself, but Ali has explicitly cut the dagger (while laboriously emphasizing it in an earlier moment). The editing of the play grows particularly slapdash, and the lines mean less and less.

What is moving here, even in a murky production with too much stillness at its center, is the assembled talents — from Kaysen to Majok to Mann — all dedicated to describing a group of girls in a hospital nearly 60 years ago. Some didn’t survive, many of them weren’t cured, a few might not have even been sick. But at least, for a while, they do interrupt our lives. We pause, together, to remember them.

What is moving here, even in a murky production with too much stillness at its center, is the assembled talents — from Kaysen to Majok to Mann — all dedicated to describing a group of girls in a hospital nearly 60 years ago. Some didn’t survive, many of them weren’t cured, a few might not have even been sick. But at least, for a while, they do interrupt our lives. We pause, together, to remember them.

Lynn has a long catalog of excellent plays, and given another whack, he might find a more active approach to Wilder’s archive. In 2011, he and the Rude Mechs company brought “The Method Gun” to New York, and I still remember its audacity — at one point, the group performed incidental lines from Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” while dodging swinging pendulums. That spirit of danger is exactly what’s missing in this lugubrious Emporium. There might be a terror to adapting a giant like Williams or Wilder, but the answer ain’t reverence: You’ve got to get in there and dance.

If intensity is what you want, then Bedlam’s electrifying D.I.Y. “Othello” at the West End Theater will better fit your needs: Shakespeare’s thriller moves faster than a freight train with broken brakes; I spent so long on the edge of my seat, I actually wrecked my back.

If intensity is what you want, then Bedlam’s electrifying D.I.Y. “Othello” at the West End Theater will better fit your needs: Shakespeare’s thriller moves faster than a freight train with broken brakes; I spent so long on the edge of my seat, I actually wrecked my back.

The show makes its own journey of return in Debbie Allen’s revival, which opened on Saturday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, nearly four decades after its Broadway premiere at the same theater, in 1988. This production doesn’t always travel smoothly — some of Allen’s staging elements war with one another. A few younger members of the ensemble, crucial to the play’s novelistic ebb and flow, are also still finding their footing. But Wilson’s language rushes past and over every barrier.

*CRITIC'S PICK* So, damn it, Janet, I’m glad that the show hasn’t entirely worked out how to do deal with the audience. The show can’t just be a sacred relic — it needs a bit of destabilizing, a tussle between the stage and the seats. Roundabout’s professionalism and coy signage can’t entirely keep the fans in check, which gives the revival itself a sense that it might spin off its axis. What will it be like the night you go? Dratch will probably say something hysterically quelling; Evans will probably knock your stockings off. But who can say? The point of “Rocky Horror” is to lose control. C’mon, let’s do it again.

*CRITIC'S PICK* This psychological delicacy comes as no surprise: Lindsay-Abaire wrote one of our most persuasive dramas on social collision, “Good People,” which explores the two ends of the class struggle in New England. I may have quibbles with the way his plot here unfolds, particularly the way it incorporates Luz, whose circumstances must be manipulated in unrealistic ways. But all boulevard comedies lean on coincidence, and I guess that applies even when the boulevard is a residential esplanade. (I laughed while I watched “The Balusters”; I only grumbled while thinking about it hours later.)

Still, the father-daughter pair does, at least, perform charmingly together. Cheadle and Edebiri are both down-to-earth and unshowy in their clear affection for each other, and they’re warmly believable as parent and child. Cheadle is laid back to the point of liquidity; he’s the only star I’ve ever seen get entrance applause for lying on a love-seat. Edebiri, though, is in another league. At several points, she manages a crucial stage trick: She can seem to shrink, collapsing inward, while the audience registers an expanding sense of presence. It will serve her beautifully in other roles.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

*CRITIC'S PICK* Now at the Winter Garden Theater, “Death of a Salesman” has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph. We haven’t exactly had a chance to miss it; four years ago, Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke were playing Willy and Linda Loman only a few blocks away. Still, we don’t begrudge a few Hamlets every season. You’re telling me Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf were available? And the director Joe Mantello? To quote Willy’s older brother, Ben, played here by a sharklike Jonathan Cake: “One must go in to fetch a diamond out.”

*CRITIC'S PICK* Now at the Winter Garden Theater, “Death of a Salesman” has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph. We haven’t exactly had a chance to miss it; four years ago, Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke were playing Willy and Linda Loman only a few blocks away. Still, we don’t begrudge a few Hamlets every season. You’re telling me Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf were available? And the director Joe Mantello? To quote Willy’s older brother, Ben, played here by a sharklike Jonathan Cake: “One must go in to fetch a diamond out.”

*CRITIC'S PICK* For the 40 or so minutes before it comes fully into itself, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is merely wonderful. The theme is: Youth. The category is: Fabulous. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, along with the dramaturg Josephine Kearns and the choreographer Omari Wiles, have revived and reappraised (not to say rescued) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical, “Cats,” by shifting it out of the wasteland of London’s alleyways and into New York’s queer ballroom scene.

*CRITIC'S PICK* For the 40 or so minutes before it comes fully into itself, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is merely wonderful. The theme is: Youth. The category is: Fabulous. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, along with the dramaturg Josephine Kearns and the choreographer Omari Wiles, have revived and reappraised (not to say rescued) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical, “Cats,” by shifting it out of the wasteland of London’s alleyways and into New York’s queer ballroom scene.

*CRITIC'S PICK* In Rosenblatt’s play, he is a BFG (Big Fractious Giant): The real man was 6-foot-6, while Lithgow is 6-foot-3. The director Nicholas Hytner keeps Dahl’s height in reserve, almost as if it’s a special effect. When the curtain rises, Lithgow is seated. He stands only after an eight-page scene at his dining-room work table, in which Dahl banters tetchily with his British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey) and fiancée, Liccy (Rachael Stirling), about contractual this and unimportant that.

*CRITIC'S PICK* There were other reasons to feel queasy at City Center, too. Certain original structural issues — “The Wild Party” runs two hours without an intermission — have been left in place, for instance. But the assembled cast is incredible, and the show fits elegantly around Jasmine Amy Rogers, who adjusts her pixie sweetness from “Boop! The Musical” into a toxic, elfin mischief.

CRITIC'S PICK - And something more is happening here, too. Radcliffe makes himself extraordinarily available to us — his fondness for the audience radiates outward from wherever he is onstage. When participants make tiny errors (say, Mrs. Patterson’s joke is a dud), he laughs with unguarded delight. He thanks those yelling out their brilliant things with a courtly nod. Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony. (His “Merrily” co-star and friend Jonathan Groff achieves a similar area-of-effect spell in “Just in Time.”)

*CRITIC'S PICK* That’s not just a morbid nature speaking. Shawn’s play, a set of interlinked monologues, is written for and from the bardo. Gregory’s production is monkishly simple: Four actors sit in chairs, facing a dimly lit audience, occasionally sipping from their mugs, telling us the stories of their lives and deaths. Gregory keeps them relaxed, but, as three hours sail by, they tell us so much — is this what you think about, when, say, your friends bury you in a ritual grave on Halloween night?