"Original, brash and bursting with theatrical energy… The irreverent but charming characters and occasional pokes at tradition in LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS make this play a very good gift." NYTheater.com "For audiences seeking a Christmas holiday show with a sly and witty New York point of view, LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS is just the ticket. A real treat."Theaterscene.net "Absolutely charming and impressive… Remarkably heartwarming… Characters are whimsical delights that spur the broadest smile."Theatermania "You would have to be a major league Grinch not to be charmed… A sharp, contemporary New York holiday story… A delightful mix of sentimentality and cynicism that is the perfect representation of Christmas in Manhattan. If you're looking for a holiday show with a slight edge, you will love LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS. It has the feel of a new Christmas perennial."Connecticut News
STUDENT BODY (High School Edition) is the alternate version of STUDENT BODY (College Edition), which is reviewed below. In the words of the author, the two plays are "utterly similar, yet wildly different". "Sexual assault on college campuses...addressing the problem is thornier than it sounds. Should campuses adjudicate cases, or only police? What if the victim wants privacy or nobody's really sure what happened at all? These tricky questions propel the action in STUDENT BODY, Frank Winters's compelling drama... A group of buddies is hanging out in their campus's scrappy theater, surrounded by plywood and power tools, when a freshman arrives seeking advice. She has discovered video on her camera from last week's party, and amid the revelry is footage of what looks like a rape. Should she call the cops? Delete the file? What if the apparent victim was willing-or the apparent rapist was someone they know? As the group debates, argues, and eventually votes (then votes again, and again) on what to do, stories from that night emerge, revealing that everyone present played some role in what happened, and everyone has something to lose. ...Winters constructs it succinctly, keeping the focus on the difficult ethical questions, not on teary confessions of knowledge or guilt. After all, if nailing one culprit solved much, it wouldn't make for such interesting drama."Miriam Felton-Dansky, The Village Voice
"Sexual assault on college campuses...addressing the problem is thornier than it sounds. Should campuses adjudicate cases, or only police? What if the victim wants privacy or nobody's really sure what happened at all? These tricky questions propel the action in STUDENT BODY, Frank Winters's compelling drama... A group of buddies is hanging out in their campus's scrappy theater, surrounded by plywood and power tools, when a freshman arrives seeking advice. She has discovered video on her camera from last week's party, and amid the revelry is footage of what looks like a rape. Should she call the cops? Delete the file? What if the apparent victim was willing-or the apparent rapist was someone they know? As the group debates, argues, and eventually votes (then votes again, and again) on what to do, stories from that night emerge, revealing that everyone present played some role in what happened, and everyone has something to lose. ...Winters constructs it succinctly, keeping the focus on the difficult ethical questions, not on teary confessions of knowledge or guilt. After all, if nailing one culprit solved much, it wouldn't make for such interesting drama."Miriam Felton-Dansky, The Village Voice
Brothers Ray and Billy desperately need their new job with the local crime boss. They've got a drunken, aging father and an overworked sister. This is their shot for something better for their family. But then Billy impulsively brings home a Russian prostitute. And the Big Bossman comes looking for her."A cross between David Mamet and the Marx Brothers ... Ullian's comedy flirts with all kinds of allegorical possibilities ... a suitably flaky style, an oddball naturalism that plays against the absurdities in the dialogue ... bland spoofery, improbable dialogue laced with specific detail and monologues like verbal jazz riffs ... Ullian has a distinctive voice." -Marianne Evett, The Cleveland Plain DealerAbout the plays of Peter Ullian:"Singularly satisfying, winning, heart rending, punchy, button-pushing, irresistible. The sense of new blood entering the mainstream achieves the palpably energizing force of a transfusion." -New York Times"Quirky, crackling prose." -The Village Voice"Without apology. Taut, absorbing. Great style and crisp wit." -Variety"Courageous, intensely empathetic characters ... very poignant ... and truthful." -The Chicago Tribune
A Rave Fable. This play hurls one of Greek tragedy's most compelling sagas into a sleek netherworld of sex, drugs and trance music. Iphigenia is the daughter of a political celebrity who embraces sensuous excess with a transgendered glam rock star named Achilles in a desperate attempt to flee her inevitable fate."Svich's text is a unique language spoken by beings that inhabit the intermediate world that she creates. It vacillates between poetry and realism, composing a theatrical intercultural dialogue that fuses aspects of modern Latin American slang with US media lingo and original rock lyrics." -Chiori Miyagawa, The Brooklyn Rail"Sacrificial women haunt the darkling world created by Caridad Svich in her bold play. It creates a transfixing vision of hell on earth, buttressed by Svich's fractured poetic voice and her unblinking laser gaze at the ethical costs of cheap labor and disposable celebrity. Svich cunningly twists our expectations of class and gender roles." -Kerry Reid, The Chicago Tribune"Caridad Svich's IPHIGENIA ... A RAVE FABLE is an exhilarating play. The narrative subtlety is what makes Svich's redux of Euripides's IPHIGENIA IN AULIS so stirring. Through video projections, throbbing music and brand-name chemicals may offer escape, they punish the soul. Svich's remarkable poetry and crackling words reveals that the ravers, now permanently numb, also want Iphigenia dead. A play of mythic power." -Mark Blankenship, Variety"Caridad Svich's play has gorgeous, drunken poetry ... This 'rave fable' re-invents the story of Agamemnon's doomed daughter as one of modern political exigency. In the chorus (of dead girls of Ciudad Juarez) Svich layers elegy and comedy, the shame and fear she feels for these lost girls. Svich makes the anonymous city stand in for the gods of ancient drama ¿ just as unforgiving, just as hungry, just as brutal." -Helen Shaw, N Y Sun
Based on the actual minutes of a women's club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the '30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium."Tom Jacobson has paid exemplary homage to real-life American heroes from a less jaded period in our history, using transcripts of minutes from a rural South Dakotan women's club that gathered monthly from 1934 through 2004, when the last two survivors begin to fade. As with other of Jacobson's plays (BUNBURY, SPERM, OUROBOROS), the playwright assigns himself intricate narrative challenges that would have sent Williams back to the loony bin ... These powerful Midwestern survivors are the stoic Americans to celebrate and honor, something Jacobson has accomplished with his lyrical, sweetly bucolic text." -Backstage"Playwright Tom Jacobson seems to challenge himself with each new project, from the ambitious interconnectivity of the two parts of OUROBOROS to the giddy rewrite of famous literature in BUNBURY. On the surface, his latest play, THE FRIENDLY HOUR, may not seem stylistically in line with his other work, but it is - its audacity is simply more quiet. It is a moving and funny piece ... Jacobson's intriguing play structure, which tells the story entirely through meetings of a club, seeks to let the passage of life over seven decades provide the drama ..." -Variety"Tom Jacobson's lovely new play chronicles the rituals of a women's club in rural South Dakota from the late '30s to 2007, and we watch the women with whom we grow increasingly familiar age and engage in theological disputes that are really at the heart of the matter. God's purpose, and the purpose of community, interweave and clash through the decades ... an impressionistic landscape that straddles the literary worlds of Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder." -L A Weekly
What if Blanche Dubois didn't go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he's fictitious, a never-seen character in an Oscar Wilde play, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo's never-seen obsession from ROMEO AND JULIET. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature, including giving ROMEO AND JULIET a happy ending."In essaying a 'play for trivial people,' Tom Jacobson has delivered a seriously clever meta-theatrical comedy and an unexpectedly moving ode to the mysterious powers of art and love in BUNBURY ... Jacobson's antic yet humane wit harpoons some of the biggest leviathans of the theatrical sea, from Wilde to Chekhov to Albee, with an impressive range and a nimble touch that recalls the young Tom Stoppard ..." -Terry Morgan, Daily Variety"... Jacobson's latest play is his most magnificent to date ... As Bunbury and Rosaline sweep through time and literature, his audience's collective imagination is also swept up in ways in which the world can change. A hundred years from now, people finding complex and ingeniously twisted great works of art could easily find it to be quite 'Jacobsonian.'" -Travis Michael Holder, Backstage West
Three wickedly scintillating plays on the artistry and science of duplicity, mendacity, and deception. THE ART OF PAINTING: "The Art of Painting" is the magnum opus of Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest artists in history, who lived his whole life ruing the life and work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, one of the greatest-er artists in history. Or "The Art of Painting" is the magnum opus of Han van Meegren, one of the greatest art forgers in history who lived his whole life ruing the work of artist Johannes Vermeer. Or "The Art of Painting" is an act of rue by Jacques van Meegren, son of one of the greatest art forgers in history, who lived his whole life bereft of a father who let him down. A story of sex, Nazis, philosophy, forgery, patricide, creation, deception, art, authenticity, rue, rue, and rue all presented with the same eye for false historical verisimilitude that its sources pretended to demand. PHONIES, FRAUDS AND FAKES: A whirlwind tour of some of the greatest liars history and nature have to offer. A list that does not include the author's ex-girlfriend who scammed him for four years, about whom he will not be speaking. IMPOSTERS: Persecuted gay British codebreaker Alan Turing helped develop the first computers and an empirical test for artificial intelligence and other minds. To write about him, the author enlisted the two 1970's robots, ELIZA and PARRY, who first challenged Turing's test. Together with the author, ELIZA and PARRY have written their tribute to Turing: a dark meditation on whether and in what forms our minds really exist.THE ART OF PAINTING"If THE ART OF PAINTING were a real art history lecture, it would be a sophomore's dream. The instructor (Mark Chrisler) is cute, and he makes the lives of long-dead white European men entertaining." -Anita Gates, The New York Times"... more exciting and intellectually stimulating than anything I remember from college ... Chrisler builds a sense of unreliability and mystery, and the twists that follow are a refreshing reminder of the vivid worlds a one-man show can create onstage." -Marissa Oberlander, Chicago ReaderPHONIES, FRAUDS AND FAKES"What starts as a witty lecture on history's biggest lies soon morphs into the fascinating story of Chrisler's four-year involvement with a girlfriend who turned out to be a pathological liar. As he relates how he fell for one whopper after another, Chrisler is insightful on self-deception and the way great liars exploit our willingness to believe what we want to believe, even when the truth is staring us in the face. Still more ingenious, Chrisler uses those very qualities against us, carefully parceling out information in a way that leaves us eager to know what happens next even after we begin to doubt the reliability of our narrator ... an unsettling and irresistible act of storytelling that ... illustrates the power of a cracking good yarn." -Zac Thompson, Chicago ReaderIMPOSTERS"Mark Chrisler credits ELIZA and PARRY as his coauthors on IMPOSTERS, and their influence is undeniably apparent. ELIZA and PARRY were two 'chatterbots': computer programs, dating from 1966 and 1972, respectively, that could generate primitive forms of conversation. Their idiosyncrasies - including ELIZA's tendency to turn everything into a question and PARRY's preoccupation with Mob involvement in horse racing - gradually invade a dialogue between the tragic British computer genius Alan Turing and an interrogator called Nicolas Bourbaki (which is also the nom de plume of a group of mathematicians who specialized in set theory), raising the question of whether Turing and Bourbaki are human ... [What emerges is ] a surprisingly vivid sense of anguish as Turing seems to go off program and, well, raise the question of whether he's human." -Tony Adler, Chicago Reader
When Doc Frankenstein and the Count fall for the same showgirl, you're in for an evening of showdowns and hoedowns that could turn Tombstone into a ghost town. A Halloween Western family entertainment in two acts. And the Mummy dances."One of the most interesting young writing talents in the off-Loop scene, Goode is in equal parts funny, angry, imaginative, crude and hopelessly over the top." -Chicago Tribune"A depraved playwright." -Denver Post"A smarty-pants theater cult-god." -Northern California Bohemian"It's easy to see why some might call Jeff Goode 'anti-Christ.'" -Arizona Daily Star"Playwright Goode is a witty wordsmith." -Beacon Journal (Akron)
"The forms of love that dare not speak their names are pretty scarce in this age of the tabloid talk shows. But that hasn't stopped Edwin Sánchez, a new playwright of tremendous emotional conviction... How do you feel, for example, about a thirty year-old Roman Catholic priest in love with a ten year-old boy? The relationship-which, it should probably be noted right away, is never consummated-is at the center of CLEAN.... Mr Sánchez is a wide-eyed, unregenerate romantic who uses what he describes as `impossible' relationships to consider and celebrate the arbitrariness of love. In a sense, the play is like a contemporary MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM in which the passion-drunk characters, rather than being sorted into socially acceptable pairs, learn to live in a world ruled by a blind Cupid. It is a theme Mr Sánchez explored in TRAFFICKING IN BROKEN HEARTS, an unsettling drama about a doomed gay triangle.... He is, in other words, a playwright to watch closely."Ben Brantley, The New York Times
"Good humor, earnestness and lots of heart. Pastor Sorenson ended up in tears and, judging by the sniffles, so did much of the audience."Los Angeles Times "…it can hardly be denied that stage shows and formal Christian worship both revolve around the theatrically purposed performance of a text in front of an audience. Part of what's so exciting about CAPTAIN OF THE BIBLE QUIZ TEAM, the soberly engaging new play by Tom Jacobson…is what happens when a playwright of Jacobson's caliber acknowledges that relationship. The immersive drama uses both the logic and the liturgy of a Lutheran church service to create a hyper-naturalistic, audience-interactive, single-performer story dramatizing recent headlines."L A Weekly
Rural Central Texas, 1909. A young Russian-Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in America through the port of Galveston, pulls his banana cart into the hamlet of Hamilton. Fleeing the vicious pogroms of his homeland, he has sought refuge in the land of the free. Able to speak only Yiddish, alone in the midst of a staunchly Christian community, he begs for shelter. Over the next thirty years, he makes a home and raises a family in this tiny town. THE IMMIGRANT is the story of a young Russian-Jewish couple and the local couple that take them in, as religion meets religion, culture meets culture, fear meets fear, and love meets love. This is the true story of Haskell Harelik, "the Immigrant". "THE IMMIGRANT received a well-deserved standing ovation on opening night at the Mark Taper Forum…superb."Pros, Variety "A lovely and loving evening of theater. Harelik's story is tender and touching"Ed Kaufman, Hollywood Reporter "A funny new play… The scenes evoke the rural era with the firm-handed clarity of a Jewish Horton Foote…they glow."Linda Winer, U S A Today
Of the hundred or so plays Euripides wrote in his lifetime only nineteen survive. Not all of them won first prize at the festivals, but BAKKHAI did."From the outset, it is essential to understand that in Greek theater, as in fact in Shakespearean theater, the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other." -Froma I Zeitlin"Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides's works." -Gilbert Norwood"... a tragic parody of a comic theme, which we have in THE BACCHAE [THE BAKKHAI], is really troublesome, and furthermore rare before our time and the great use of it by Samuel Beckett ... THE BACCHAE makes it plain that some uses of comedy do not diminish tragedy or 'relieve' it but indeed augment it." -Donald Sutherland"The most obvious influence of Euripides's BAKKHAI on Christian mythology lies in its concept of Dionysos as the suffering Son of God." -Arthur Evans"Sometimes Euripides seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright." -John Jay Chapman
In Mac Wellman's black comedy, a very angry person attempts to make sense of his understanding of law and order in a world of other angry persons."... this comic/horror story examines the legacy that the cowboy has wrought on American society - where exactly the shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude has left us ... a brilliantly funny opening scene ..." -Scott Proudfit, Backstage West
Set in South Lebanon, HOW HIS BRIDE CAME TO ABRAHAM is a soaring love story. When a fleeing refugee encounters a soldier wounded by a roadside bomb, irresistible Palestinian and Israeli characters clash, then ignite a passion that heals."One of the most powerful antiwar plays ever penned ... this life-altering script." -Plays International, London"Sunde's timely, gripping, and richly magical play ... this modern day ROMEO AND JULIET ... an engrossing look at how war can prematurely turn children into adults ... emotional pull of her drama ... will haunt audiences well after the end of the play ... forces beyond man might be at work." -AmericanTheaterWeb.com"A masterpiece ... no soft edges ... goes straight to the heart of the conflict ... outstanding writing, sound, direction, and acting - all the elements that make great theater." -Melissa Kleiner, Bloomberg Radio"Sunde does not take sides in the conflict, and the dialogue has a crisp, biting edge ... gripping drama ... timely romantic drama ... volatile battle zone ... vivid portraits of offstage characters and action ... cinematic thrust of the pieces summons the inspiration for a dandy film." -Variety"... its events seem ripped right out of today's headlines ... pacifist tragedy ... a fateful night that profoundly changes them - and us. Its incisive dialogue, riveting action, and searing audience impact ... The play would likewise make a first-rate film." -Plays International, London"HOW HIS BRIDE CAME TO ABRAHAM creates an extraordinary modern pacifist myth in which a wounded male Israeli soldier and a female Palestinian terrorist experience each other's passionate hunger for their homes and rights ... it indelibly etches itself upon viewers' souls." -Contemporary Dramatists, London
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