Steven Pounders and Stan Denman while away the time.

Wallace and Valdez don’t get to actually do much in Craig Wright’s The Unseen. They are prisoners in separate, adjacent cells of a massive prison complex; and between torture sessions, they converse through the wall. Having chosen this setup, the playwright puts a lot of pressure on his own ability deliver language compelling enough keep the audience’s attention. In today’s edition of Scriptease, we offer a sample…after the jump. Read more »

This season’s succès de scandale is Sheila Callaghan’s That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, a play that our own David Cote said “whipsaws between laughs and squirms.” Haven’t gotten there yet? You now have plenty more chances, since the Rattlestick has just announced an extension through March 28. If that isn’t motivation enough, try this taster of Sheila’s shenanigans. (And keep in mind, these are just stage directions. Imagine what filth ensues once the speaking starts.)

AGNES and VALERIE take off their gowns. They are wearing lingerie underneath. They each do a line of coke off the other’s ass.

Meanwhile, RODNEY and OWEN light up cigars. They sit perched forward in their chairs and begin throwing money down.

JANE FONDA dumps the jello into the table. AGNES and VALERIE climb into the jello table. JANE FONDA retrieves a whistle.

That’s what I thought. Buy your tickets here.

If you were at Our Town on Tuesday, in case you were wondering: Yes, I was the guy with the glasses on the aisle in the middle section, blubbering through most of Act III. If you haven’t yet seen director David Cromer’s spare, beautiful production of Thornton Wilder’s American masterpiece, go buy tickets now—and don’t read any reviews other than our own David Cote’s, as many of them give away an important point about this particular production. We don’t look favorably on spoilers ’round these parts.

It’s no secret that the third act of Our Town deals with death; its effect is to make you take a fresh look at life. What struck me anew in watching this production, however, was how deftly Wilder weaves death into the picture right from the start, and that’s what we’ll be looking at in this installment of our Scriptease series…right after the jump.

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Scorpions run amok in Artaud's chaotic fantasia.

Can’t wait until the summer brings its usual raft of theater festivals? Then wait no longer, friends, because tonight marks the start of the East Village’s third annual FRIGID New York, a highly eclectic and very affordable hotchpotch of shows by emerging companies. Many of the productions look quite promising: Check out the full roster here. But one in particular caught our eye, for sheer guts if nothing else: No. 11 Productions’ bold attempt—ah, brave youth!—to stage Antonin Artaud’s surrealist, insanely unstageable 1925 doodle Jet of Blood [Jet de Sang].

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Ah, the idle pleasures of PDF surfing. Looking over the script of Eugene O’Neill’s mammoth three-play Mourning Becomes Electra as I prepare my review of the New Group’s (gag) revival, I can tell you this: The words bitter, bitterly and bitterness occur a total of 52 times in the play, mostly in stage directions. That’s an average of two a page. In related concordance news: Hate, hated and hatred occur 66 times. Yeah, it’s a very angsty play, with buckets of oedipal rage. And it may be an American classic, but c’mon, Gene, couldn’t you reach for a thesaurus?

Playwright David Johnston puts his sassy spin on classic literature with a dash of camp and healthy dose of black humor. His last production with the excellent Blue Coyote Theater Group was the weirdly faithful yet utterly irreverent retelling of The Oresteia. And it was one of the treats of the season. Now Johnston trains his jaded, roguish eye on Slavic tropes. Conversations on Russian Literature—four short plays sending up Chekhov, Stalin and, er, Mothra—is at the Access Theater through March 7. To whet your appetite, we offer the following excerpts, completely out of context. Read more »