“I want to yell things in newspapers,” one character says in Leslie Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians. The granddaughter of a prominent minister who fled his native Armenia for freedom in America, she intends to tell anyone who will listen that her people’s suffering–which remains palpable today–has been ignored by humankind…

If you’re like most people, chances are there’s a situation from your past, oft-told at small gatherings, that has always seemed worthy to you of dramatization. “After all,” you say to yourself after having regaled a cozy audience of acquaintances with your oddly funny, slightly embellished tale, “people keep telling…

Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…

By the time the curtain falls on David Mamet’s Oleanna, you’re likely to have changed your mind several times about whose side is more “right” in the two-character drama. You’re also bound to gain new insight into a misunderstood, sometimes-maligned playwright. To begin with, the play examines political correctness, sexual…

A few years from now, an enterprising promoter is going to reap a considerable fortune repackaging the hits of, say, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lyle Lovett. But the show won’t be sold to American audiences by sending it out on the usual concert circuit. Nor will it seize its target…

Plays about the theater have enjoyed a healthy success for at least 2,500 years, ever since Greek dramas were followed on the day’s bill of fare by comedies that made fun of the serious action preceding them. Somehow, audiences never tire of listening to the lamentations of people paid to…

Something has happened to the experimental theater. Time was when an alternative-theater piece was certain to be as iconoclastic as it was entertaining–when performance pieces opposed in form and content to mainstream theater practices and conventions would draw an audience for both their novelty and their political and social commentaries,…