David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross more than twenty years ago, but this study of unscrupulous salesmen pitching worthless plots in Florida is acutely relevant today. The hustlers who helped create the current financial meltdown by persuading thousands of working people to buy houses they couldn’t afford must be very…

Michael Frayn’s brilliant Noises Off is one of the cleverest, funniest farces ever written. This is a play within a play — actually, a play outside a play. It depicts the struggles of a third-rate company touring the English provinces in a corny sex farce called Nothing On — lots…

Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…

I was so bored during the first act of The Trip to Bountiful that I had trouble staying in my seat — and this despite a powerful performance from Kathleen M. Brady as Carrie Watts, the elderly woman trapped in a Houston apartment with her son, Ludie, and his disagreeable…

Although there was only a small audience for Listen Productions’ Mediamockracy on the night I attended, its members were intensely involved in the play. As I discovered during the actor-audience chats inserted into the performance, these were media-savvy people, deeply aware of the role of news dissemination in a democracy…

Braided Sorrow. No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set…

Curse of the Starving Class. The moment you walk into the theater, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life. You…

No one knows exactly how many young women have been murdered in the Mexican border town of Juárez over the last decade, perhaps three or four hundred. The murder rate shot up after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1994, when several U.S. companies set up…

Les Misérables is a huge, sprawling musical filled with emotional songs that tell the story of Victor Hugo’s novel. The plot centers on the merciless pursuit of a freed prisoner, Jean Valjean, by a bitter police detective, Javert. In the course of the chase, which continues over several decades, we…

Curse of the Starving Class. The moment you walk into the theater, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life. You…

Some parts of Tiny Alice are laughably literal. At the beginning, for instance, a Catholic cardinal in full black-and-red regalia tweets affectionately at some caged birds — cardinals, naturally. Other words and images seem to offer easy metaphoric puzzles, as when Julian, the lay brother who will emerge as the…

The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed by the…

There’s a period in women’s lives — roughly the years between 18 and 24 — that strikes me as profoundly touching. During this time, young women are often filled with inchoate plans and longings, and they haven’t yet figured out the distinction between possible and impossible. They’re absolutely alive to…

Most of the characters in Avenue Q are college graduates in that in-between stage — bright and literate, finished with school but not ready for the daily grind of making a living — and they’ve congregated on New York’s grungy Avenue Q. Idealistic Kate is a kindergarten teacher and also…

Bubs. This is a play accompanied by songs, a concert yoked to a narrative, with the elements held together by the talent and energy of actor-singer Erik Sandvold. Writers Cy Frost and Doug Olson came up with the idea of showcasing a slew of different performers, all played by one…

Bubs is a crossover production, a play accompanied by songs, a concert yoked to a narrative, and that’s not a bad thing: Crossovers attract new people to an art form that everyone seems to agree is in trouble (though we’ve been worrying about theater for decades, and it never does…

The moment you walk into the theater for Curse of the Starving Class, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life…

The Eyes of Babylon. Jeff Key is an ex-Marine — a man devoted to the idea of patriotism and service to his country — whose homosexuality represents a deep part of his psyche. He left the service in part because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but also…

The Eyes of Babylon. Jeff Key is an ex-Marine — a man devoted to the idea of patriotism and service to his country — whose homosexuality represents a deep part of his psyche. He left the service in part because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but also…

The characters in Twelve Angry Men are straight-up ’50s stereotypes: the wishy-washy adman; the mindless sports fanatic; the pathetic old guy whose life is lonely and filled with regret; the onetime slum kid; the paranoid racist; the Eastern European immigrant — Jewish, no doubt — who, bearing the heavy weight…

Iraq War, the Musical. Unlike so many political satires, Iraq War, the Musical has teeth. It’s a sustained and ultimately serious attack on the Bush administration’s war and the lies told by Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney in order to launch it. Through skits and songs, writer-creator Paul Cross tells the…

In many years of faithful attendance at Heritage Square Music Hall, I have never seen T.J. Mullin lose control of an audience. Sure, he always gives the jokers in the seats some play, letting them interrupt or yell out a comment or two — but he was having serious trouble…