Grand Horizons
Written by Bess Wohl
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Second Stage Theatre – Helen Hayes Theatre
December 29, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

This is going to be a gold mine for community theatre everywhere in just a few years.  That I am sure.  Grand Horizons offers roles for  actors in their twenties and seventies and beyond.  It is a simple unit set (apart from a U-Haul truck that you must see to believe).  It is funny and the humor is only mildly adult.  Only would the most conservative of communities find this offensive.  

The plot centers around Bill and Nancy that have spent 50 years together as a couple totally in sync.  But then, in the first moments of the play, the unthinkable happens and Nancy wants out.  This sudden move to divorce after so many years is unimaginble  to their grown children, and they work to unweave their parents predicament.  The play is full of two and three person scenes that are true gems.  Nothing is radically new here – it becomes the very best of TV scripts. Continue reading Grand Horizons →

The Sound Inside
Written by Adam Rappelled
Directed by David Cromer
Studio 54
January 29, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

Wow!   This is the most unexpected play of the entire trip and one of the most beautiful.  I had no idea what to expect – I had read notihng in advance of the show.  I knew that it was at Studio 54 and I expected it to be big and bold.  It was, but in a totally unexpended way!  It was my first surprise in an afternoon full of surprises.  

The play is a two-hander featuring the REMARKABLE Mary-Louise Parker coming to the story with 30+ years of remarkable stage work – she is an entire theatrical event in herself.   The plot revolves around a  writing professor at Yale who has just received a diagnosis of stage 2 cancer. In much of the play, she addresses the audience directly as if reading a novel-in-progress aloud.  The story then eventually includes Christopher Dunn, a freshman in a course of hers called Reading Fiction for Craft.  She is a mysterious teacher with surprises up her sleeve and he is a misfit of Yale that just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Continue reading The Sound Inside →

The Inheritance
Written by Matthew Lopez
Directed by Stephen Daldry
Ethel Barrymore Theatare
December 26, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

Nothing is more wonderful then curling up with a good book – a good thick book that will take you though the lives of many people and occupy many hours of page turning –  and when the book is a good one the time just cannot be beat!  In Matthew Lopez’s beautifully sculpted play, The Inheritance you in in for a full day’s read in the best possible sense – it is being read live right in front of you.  The seven plus hours of production occupies your day from 2:00 to 10:00pm and gives you four intermissions and a dinner break.  It is theatre heaven!    The staging even provides 28 men sitting around the giant coffee table of a stage – all in bare feet – ready to take us through the journey. Continue reading The Inheritance →