It’s interesting how suicide and comedy make such great bedfellows. When “All New People,” Zach Braff’s first foray into playwriting, begins, a young scruffy man is hanging from an orange noose in a beach house on Long Beach Island, NJ. What may seem like a dark, uncomfortable subject becomes the catalyst for 90 snappy and hilarious minutes. As Charley (Justin Bartha) swings like a suicidal Tarzan, an enthusiastic British girl named Emma (Krysten Ritter) bursts in. It turns out that she was supposed to show the house to “some old Jews.” Her presence of course stops his suicide attempt. We are soon joined by Myron (David Wilson Barnes), the neighborhood fireman and Emma’s sometimes boyfriend, and Kim (Anna Camp) an “escort” sent to Charley to cheer him up. As each character comes in, the ridiculousness only gets heightened and the laughs only increase.
Just as in an Agatha Christie novel the objective is to figure out who committed the crime, the central task at hand in this play is to find out who Charley really is, and why he wanted to end his life so badly. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
All New People,
Garden State,
Justin Bartha,
Krysten Ritter,
Scrubs,
Second Stage Theatre,
Trust,
Zach Braff
Actresses Kristen Bush and Laura Heisler in Kin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.
Recently, plays and performances have relied highly on their flashy costumes, sets, and scale to draw in audiences. From Spider-Man to Priscilla Queen of the Desert, it would seem that the theater world is saturated with spectacle. In spite of all this, a new play called Kin brings theater back to what it should be about: making real magic by getting real people in a room together and seeing what happens. The play is about the incidental relationships that form and coalesce when two people fall in love. Rather than using the couple in question to create the drama, Bathsheba Doran skillfully examines these side relationships, and writes quick and snappy dialogue that never manages to feel jarring. In the process, she creates a completely believable cast of characters whose back stories and life stories that audience cares, and even better, wants to know about.
Their stories are forever entwined, like the body of a knotty family tree. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Kin,
Playwrights Horizons,
Theater Teen Reviewers and Critics
When I first saw that Zach Braff and Sutton Foster were doing an Off-Broadway play together called Trust, I was very excited. I loved Zach Braff on Scrubs and Sutton Foster in her various musical comedy performances on Broadway. Given the stars talent with humor, I thought Trust would be a light comedy with not much to think about. I walked into the theater, and in less than one minute of stage time, I realized that the play was MUCH darker than expected.
Written by Paul Weitz, the play centers around Harry (played by Braff) a rich married man who decides to go to an S&M parlor. Domestic violence, blackmail and dominatrixes abound, but the play manages be funny anyway. It pushes about as many boundaries as an R rated movie does, which teens have been watching since they were pre-teens. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Second Stage Theatre,
Sutton Foster,
Trust,
Zach Braff
Imagine a three- hour concert with no instruments at all. If there are no instruments, what is there? At Lincoln Center’s International Body Music Festival, the viewers were invited to find out. The objective of the night was to expose viewers to the lines where music and dance blur. All of the acts had something in common: the human body was used to its full potential.
The first group was the throat singers Celina Kalluk and Lucie Idlout who hailed from Nunavut, Canada. This was definitely something I had never heard before. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Barbatuques,
Celina Kalluk,
Derique McGee,
International Body Music Festival,
Keith Terry,
Lincoln Center Out of Doors,
Lucie Idlout,
SLAMMIN All-Body Band
$5 Tickets
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