Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” a big hit in New York and London, is a play with an intriguing premise, detailed characters and a palpable sense of foreboding. The production now onstage at the Unicorn Theatre showcases nice work by talented actors who wrestle gamely with material that seems designed to remain just beyond their reach. […]
The stage has never been a comfortable home for sports stories — mainly because you can’t really show the fights, games or marathons — but Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves” is a remarkable effort to capture the politics, angst and hormone-driven conflicts on a girls’ soccer team. This play earned praise in New York and Chicago, […]
If you wonder why some members of the working class became Trump supporters, then check out the Unicorn Theatre’s production of “Sweat,” a drama that won playwright Lynn Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize. Nottage depicts racial animosity, class resentment and economic disparity as friendships are destroyed and lives forever altered in this carefully constructed play. […]
That women suffer during wartime is hardly a news flash. Troops have raped indiscriminately throughout history. But a war crime is a war crime. And dramatists have appropriately revisited, examined and judged atrocities since the beginning of theater. Danai Gurira’s drama “Eclipsed” gains strength from its specificity. Gurira sets her five-character story in the later […]
Could it be more timely? A radical satire about America’s history of slavery and enduring black and white stereotypes at the Unicorn Theatre captures the country’s zeitgeist with amazing accuracy. I’ve never seen a play quite like “An Octoroon” by New York-based Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, winner of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship. He uses an 1859 melodrama […]
I wish I could say how many times “whatever” is uttered in the meandering dialogue of The Way We Get By. But I wasn’t counting. Nor did I tally the repetitions of “like,” another place-holder word employed by the inarticulate. “Whatnot” makes a handful of cameo appearances. Incomplete sentences and thought fragments abound. Playwright Neil […]
