The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking is a reflective look at the most difficult time in her life. As a world-class writer, Didion resorts to her craft to help clarify her own thoughts Read more

Radio Golf

How can African Americans achieve success in a country where they still are a minority in numbers and wealth?  That’s the intriguing issue posed by Radio Golf, the last play in August Wilson’s twentieth century cycle.  Read more

Rock ‘n’ Roll

“What you like about brains,” a Czech emigrant classics student named Lenka tells the Communist Cambridge philosophy don Max in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, “… is that they all work in the same way. What you don’t like about minds is that they don’t.” Read more

Stoop Stories

Dael Orlandersmith’s Stoop Stories are a series of monologues that become hypnotic poetry about people she’s watched in New York who pursue the American Dream. Because they are outsiders, losers and dopers, the unseen ones, they sit on their front porch steps to talk, to drink and dream. They never go anywhere, but they travel and take you with them - far beyond Harlem, the East or West Villages, Brooklyn or the Bronx. Read more

The Receptionist

The Receptionist opens with a soggy biscuit of a monologue and ends with an inexplicable hiccup, but in between it is as crisp as a Necco Wafer and as chilling as death. Forget what you may have heard about this play: it is not Dilbert. It is not The Office. It is not even a comedy. It is a seventy-five minute meditation on the banality of evil, with plenty of banality, and even more evil. Read more

The Seafarer

The Seafarer
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Paul Mullins
Produced by The Studio Theatre
Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

Some plays set the stage not only literally but figuratively, preparing the audience for what will occur over the course of their action.  And then there are those whose sets are more deceptive: where a cozy walnut, velour and floral-carpeted interior, a slim Christmas tree ablaze with lights, and the familiar strains of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” from a home stereo are not indicators, but prevaricators.  Read more

Grey Gardens director and star talk about the show

Barbara Walsh, star of Grey Gardens
Interview by Joel Markowitz

She’s a hometown girl, and she’s back performing on the Metheny Stage at Studio Theatre as Edie and Edith in Studio Theatre’s production of Grey Gardens. An excerpt from their phone interview is below. Read the entire conversation here.

Joel: How difficult is it to try to put your own stamp on roles that other actresses have created - playing Joanne in the revival of Company, which was created by Elaine Stritch, and Edie/Edith in Grey Gardens, created by Christine Ebersole? Read more

Blackbird

Blackbird
By David Harrower
Directed by David Muse
Produced by Studio Theatre
Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

There’s a new kid on the block, and he’s taken up residence with what promises to be one of the neighborhood’s most satisfyingly, yet disturbingly quirky families: the new Milton Series, housed in the bird’s nest of Studio’s intimate Milton Theatre.  The Milton’s location is entirely appropriate to David Harrower’s harrowing Blackbird.  This one-act, (essentially) two-person trek through the gnarled jungle-undergrowth of the human heart, psyche, and conscience Read more

Grey Gardens

Grey Gardens
Book by Doug Wright,
Music by Scott Frankel,
Lyrics by Michael Korie
Based on the documentary by David and Albert Maysles
Directed by Serge Seiden
Produced by Studio Theatre
Reviewed by Gary McMillan

Studio Theatre’s Grey Gardens is a beautifully rendered and wonderfully off-kilter production of this Off Broadway-to-Broadway cult musical. Wealth and ZIP code are often the determining factors between the labels of madness and eccentricity. And as goes the old saying, eccentricity doesn’t run in the Beale family of East Hampton … it gallops. Read more

A Beautiful View

A Beautiful View
by Daniel MacIvor
directed by Daniel MacIvor 
produced by Studio 2ndStage
reviewed by Tim Treanor

A Beautiful View is minor MacIvor, a light saunter through the fields fronting the forest of the human psyche. Lane (Jennifer Mendenhall) and Max (Kathleen Coons) meet, lie to each other, fall in love, have sex. Max takes off (she’s not bisexual, after all - not well organized enough) but they eventually meet again, and become good friends. Lane gets married; it doesn’t work out. Max has a relationship with a dentist; it doesn’t work out. They get jobs, lose jobs, move. They form a ukulele band. Read more

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