Toby Zinman

To borrow a great line from Harold Pinter's Homecoming: 'You never heard such silence,' and in this brilliant Broadway production of Pinter's Old Times, directed by Douglas Hodge, the silences are simply deafening. The mysteries of memory, like the mysteries of marriage are the subjects of this elusive, tantalizing play but the great Sub-Texter himself, and this sleek and stylish British cast deepens the mysteries without ever solving them...The characters are isolated in space, silenced in mid-sentence, while jokey moments of coffee-sipping in unison and legs flung over chair arms break the tension momentarily. Similarly, the eerie electronic music by Thom Yorke and a sound design by Clive Goodwin bolster the atmosphere of dis-ease. Owen is sexy and swaggering and bewildered; Reilly, with her superb profile, is sexy and stern and unyielding; Best is sexy and opulent and, to use a word you don't hear much anymore, beguiling. All told is this a great and unnerving production.

Scholars tell us that the ancient Greek masks of Comedy and Tragedy were often hung on the same hook. The face underneath those masks might have been Alan Cumming's. His dazzling Emcee is at first comic, leading us on a louche pansexual romp through the decadence of Berlin during the Weimar years. Then his performance grows darker and darker, as the show does, as despair and terror creep in as the Nazis gain power. Cumming is so irresistible that nobody else onstage stands much of a chance...Michelle Williams, lovely as she is, is the weak link in this big strong cast. She seems neither desperate nor outrageous nor self-mocking, as Sally Bowles needs to be, and even in her huge rendition of the show's title song, she seems to be trying too hard, too rehearsed, too controlled, too humorless.

Will Eno, theater's reigning prince of snarky anomie, has two new plays on in New York, one his Broadway debut, The Realistic Joneses, and one off, The Open House. His signature style--established with Thom Pain (based on nothing)--is deadpan wordplay. This off-kilter dialogue is even stranger when it's in the mouths of the starry cast: Marisa Tomei, Toni Collette, Tracy Letts and Michael C. Hall, who all turn in remarkable performances, given that they have to deliver lines that seem to defy all the expectations of coherent stage speech. Sam Gold directs the proceedings with an admirably straight face, although the audience found the play hilarious.

The difficulty with this antiquated sympathetic feminism, is that Young Woman (Rebecca Hall) is clearly not Everywoman but someone too frail and neurotic to deal with the world...The brilliant director, Lyndsey Turner, whose knockout of a show, Chimerica, was a hit in London earlier this season, creates a great look and a great rhythm for this Machinal, imitating the beat and the sounds of a huge societal machine that grinds up lives. The noirish dialogue is based on unrelenting repetitions and the didactic clichés of the era. The revolving set (Es Devlin) and moody lighting (Jane Cox) are the most exciting aspects of this short, stale play.

Last performed on Broadway more than sixty years ago, somebody at Roundabout Theatre Company must have thought it was a good idea to revive this moldy-oldy, assemble an impressive cast, give it a glamorized production under Doug Hughes' direction, and see what happened. The result: nothing...The production's star, Bobby Cannavale, dressed in tennis whites or a tuxedo, is not only miscast, but his current hot-stuff career gives the lie to the play's point: it's no longer an us-vs-them game.

Cat is a play about disease: not just the cancer that is destroying Big Daddy, but the 'mendacity' and 'disgust' devouring the family, and, by implication, American society: much more is at stake than the land, and we should be more powerfully moved than I, at least, was this time through.

Local audiences might remember a terrific production of Grace by the Luna Theatre four years ago. It’s a play made for an intimate space, requiring a cast of subtle actors and a director who loves irony and can tolerate ambiguity. Judging by the current Broadway production, the script is not served so well by giving it a starry cast and an immense stage. The play is still intriguing and provocative and startling, but it’s essentially Off-Broadway material, suffering, under Dexter Bullard’s direction, from size and slickness.