NEW YORK — When Cuban-American director and playwright María Irene Fornés died last fall, the New York Times obituary referred to her as “an underrecognized genius.” Now, what is perhaps her finest work, “Fefu and Her Friends,” can be seen at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Revolutionary in its form and daring in its philosophy, “Fefu,” from 1977, hasn’t played off-Broadway since its debut. Think of it as the masterpiece no one has seen.
NEW YORK — Ian Barford can tell when the audience turns against him. It begins with a kiss, and escalates during a breakup scene. By the time he hobbles through a door, desperate to reconcile, “they’re just hissing at me, practically throwing things at me,” Barford said.
Tania and Syngin were fighting. It was mid-June and sultry, with the afternoon temperature snaking toward 80 degrees. They hadn’t slept much the night before — blame work, blame sex — and now, in the front seats of a lumbering Chevy Suburban, having already missed a couple of turnoffs along a New York highway, they began to argue about the future. Did Syngin have a plan? Could Tania stop yelling?
Yes, Jake Gyllenhaal was crying, but it was a dignified kind of crying. Less sobbing, more welling. “Sorry,” he said, collecting himself. “I hate this. It seems performative in an interview.” But if you open yourself to the problem of existence in what may or may not be a determinate universe — which is what Gyllenhaal was doing on an afternoon two weeks ago — tears happen.
Halley Feiffer was a lonely high school student when she fell hard for a tall, dark and long-dead Russian. Aaron Posner met the same man in college and it was really more of a love/hate situation. “It ended up being kind of the ultimate frustration,” he said. “Almost like a tease.” That special guy: Anton Chekhov, a father of modern drama and one of the most acute chroniclers of the human condition in its brilliant, broken, awkward variety.
Onstage they have dated, married, divorced. Offstage, they have never been single at the same time. “Thank God,” Scott said. “We are meant to be friends.”
Through decades of musicals and plays, he disguised these events, rewrote the characters, tore up his autobiography and scattered its details — confetti-like and not always consciously.
(Critic's Pick): NEW YORK — Phileas Fogg, the imperturbable hero of “Around the World in 80 Days,” has returned to New York, having taken up residence at the New Victory Theater. Laura Eason, a playwright who usually traffics in more adult fare (“Sex with Strangers,” “House of Cards”) has adapted Jules Verne’s novel into a fleet and often rollicking trek for the squirmier end of the elementary school crowd and their guardians. It travels light.
At the end of a dinner break recently, a group of actors and designers sprawled in a loose circle. Two men huddled together, sharing an online video, another man scrolled through a feed, fingers skimming the screen like skaters gliding across a frozen lake. A woman lay on the floor stretching, her phone nestled neatly at her hip.
NEW YORK — Once upon a time, a little boy became a literary sensation. A man with a peculiar take on happily ever after, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, wrote tales that have inspired operas, ballets and a couple of Disney movies. His oversize statue — with oversize top hat and oversize cygnet — permanently hogs a granite bench in Central Park. Now Andersen arrives at the Duke on 42nd Street, with the Ensemble for the Romantic Century’s “Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined...
Tom and Louise meet up every week, same time, same place, same order: London Pride for him, white wine for her. They chat, down their drinks, rush out the door to the office of their marriage counselor.Uganda New York Times entertainment19 Apr 2019
NEW YORK — Behind the glass window of a Midtown Manhattan recording studio, Patti LuPone, summery in a short white dress, swayed to the syncopated beat. “A kiss can be bliss when it spans the abyss,” she sang. Then she began to scat: “Zoowa zoop zooza zooway.”