A Wonderland (Eamonn Farrell/William Antoniou) -- "A Wonderland" is over-long and under-focused, but it has many many wonderful elements in it that, even though they don't add up to a satisfying whole, give a great deal of theatrical pleasure. Read more
A Question of Mercy (David Rabe) -- "Question of Mercy" is an excellent one-act play unfortunately inflated by two superfluous characters and uninformative monologues. But it is graced by the superb performance of Tim Spears as the AIDS-ridden Anthony, who infuses this overlong production with verve and heart. Read more
Babes In Toyland (adapted by Michael Levinton) -- The prime, if not sole, goal of a comedy is to be funny, and by this simple clear standard, the Little Lord Fauntleroys' re-production of Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough's 1903 operetta "Babes in Toyland," fails to deliver. Read more
Book of Lambert (Leslie Lee) -- Despite the evident attention that Lee has given to this early script to contemporize and re-fashion it, it still feels like the script of a younger writer, and the better part of valor may have been to let the three-decade-old unproduced script stay tucked away. Read more
Cake (Felipe Ossa) -- The play's title refers to a book, Let Them Eat Cake, by one Dana Dunnigan (Ramona Floyd), a right-wing, liberal-gutting radio shockmeister whose star is on the rise in the conservative firmament of 1999. Read more
COBU 2009 (Yako Miyamoto) -- Anything percussive, like drumming and tap, suckers me right in, and COBU's combination of all-things-percussive constitutes my perfect storm. Read more
Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant -- What else is left to say? Everyone had a good time and left the theatre well-nourished. Of how many evenings of theatre can that be said these days? Read more
Crave (Sarah Kane) -- It is well-nigh impossible to hear Sarah Kane's aching meditation on the cravings for love, connection, and understanding minus the static bred by her suicide several months after the piece was written. But it is important to do so in order to judge the work as theatre. Read more
Do Not Do This Ever Again (Karinne Keithley) -- The talented eight-member crew of "Do Not..." drapes long swags of faux-meaningful text over the audience in order to decrease their oxygen supply and slip them into a hypnotic state. Read more
The Europeans (Howard Barker) -- This year, The Potomac Theatre Project has decided to do the American premiere of Howard Barker's "The Europeans," and for the most part, It did not manage to make Barker's meditations and investigations about war, freedom, morality, history, and power (and its attendant eroticism) take on dramatic life. Read more
Fuente Ovejuna (Lope de Vega) -- The Nylon Fusion Collective brings Adrian Mitchell's translation of de Vega's script to the stage in a production that, while spirited and earnest, lacks sharpness in both execution and conception. Read more
Happy In The Poorhouse (Derek Ahonen) -- I don't know if Happy In The Poorhouse, the new offering by The Amoralists at Theatre 80 St. Marks, is funny, but it is comedic. Read more
Heistman (Matthew Maher) -- Steve Ratazzi's performance is what gives the piece any intellectual heft that it has: by turns flippant, fear-laden, comic, and dangerous, Ratazzi turns the commonplaces of the Manifesto, which are a dull read on the page, into words with edges and possibilities. Read more
The Judgment of Paris (Austin McCormick) -- Buried in all of this Baz Lurhmann-styled "Moulin Rouge" hoopla is a commentary about the (ab)use of women by both men and women, as well as something about the horrible exhilaration of war, but these only barely manage to break through the collaged and pastiched surface that McCormick trowels onto the original story. Read more
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Stephen Adly Guirgis) -- Wide Eyed Productions presents a competent production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' talky but clever The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the purported narrative of a trial in present-day Purgatory about whether Judas should be forgiven for his betrayal of Jesus Christ. Read more
Lavaman (Casey Wimpee) -- Praise for the three actors for their total commitment to what is happening on the stage and for a production that, in its trading of bodily fluids and its admiration for the dead art of punk, channels some much needed transgressive energy out into the boutiqued and malled environs of Soho. Read more
LIVE/FEED (Chance D. Muehleck) -- The distinction between "nonsense" and "non-sense" is important to "getting" Nerve Tank's LIVE/FEED, a self-called "movement theater mash-up" that riffs off the phrase/curse "may you live in interesting times." Read more
Looking Up (Carla Cantrelle) -- This two-actor show about finding love takes place in a bar that hosts a trapeze act(!). Read more
Macbeth (William Shakespeare) -- The challenge to producing a play by Shakespeare is always how to make the familiar fresh, to re-imagine what has been already been re-(and re-)imagined, and Hipgnosis Theatre Company has tried to do this with its current production of "Macbeth." Read more
Medea and Its Double (Hyoung-Taek Limb) -- Director Hyoung-Taek Limb uses Euripides to explore the passion that drove Medea to kill King Creon, his daughter Glauce, and her own two children as an act of revenge against the infidelity of her husband, Jason. He does this by "splitting" the title character into two Medeas onstage, one dubbed "Medea as mother" and the other as "Medea as lover" (played by See-Yeon Koo and Kyoung Lee, respectively) Their struggle, both literal and metaphoric, over whether life should be preserved or blood spilt in anger comprises the moral and emotional center of the play. Read more
Missa Solemnis or The Play About Henry (Roman Feeser) -- Director Linda Nelson has done her best to extract and shape whatever dramatic tension exists in the play, but she is often stymied by the undramatic structure of the script itself, which begins, in the first scene, with Henry committing his suicide, and then gives the audience what amounts to a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation of how Henry came to his end. Read more
Never In My Lifetime (Shirley Gee) -- Shirley Gee's award-winning play is set in mid-1970s Northern Ireland, at a time when the violence associated with "The Troubles" had reached a particularly vicious peak. A little rough around the edges, this debut effort by 3 isles Productions is nevertheless competently done. Read more
Order (Christopher Boal) -- Christopher Boal begins Order with an intriguing gambit: a man seeks to do and be good in a world inclined to do evil. Read more
The Realm (Sarah Myers) -- The dystopic world of Sarah Myers' The Realm, set in "a future not so far from now" and "mostly underground," features the standard elements of such dystopias... Read more
Scenes from an Execution (Howard Barker) -- For the most part, director Richard Romagnoli has crafted a balanced and energized production, and Jan Maxwell has created a Galactia who may be impossible to love but who demands that we pay attention -- and we do, to our delighted agitation. Read more
Scythian Stones (Virlana Tkacz) -- Scythian Stones, created and produced by Yara Arts Group (a resident company of La MaMa), folds songs and memoirs from Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan into the ancient Sumerian epic of Inanna's descent into the underworld to tell about the journey of two women leaving home to travel into the wider world. Read more
Signs of Life (Peter Ullian, Len Schiff, Joel Derfner) -- Some subjects defeat the best intentions of theater artists to make compelling dramatic works, and the Holocaust is one of them. "Signs of Life" is a musical based on the Jewish inmates of Theresienstadt, the Czech ghetto/slaughterhouse dubbed by Adolf Hitler as "A City for the Jews." Though well-intended and well-performed, its music and lyrics cannot outmatch the savage destruction visited upon the Jews and others by the Third Reich. Read more
Somewhere in the Pacific (Neal Bell) -- While Neal Bell's core desire in the play, as told in his program notes, is to show how homophobia damages not only its target but also its targeters, from captain on down to private, his good intention gets lost in the play's clunky structure and its WWII-war-movie-inflected dialogue. Read more
Sweet, Sweet Motherhood (Jeremy Kareken) -- "Sweet, Sweet Motherhood" has a red herring at its heart. Read more
Thérèse Raquin (adapted by Neal Bell) -- The Potomac Theatre Project's production of Neal Bell's 1991 theatrical reconstruction of Émile Zola's novel is considered and competent, and therein lies its strength and its weakness. Read more
Thirst: Memory of Water (Jane Catherine Shaw) -- In Thirst: Memory of Water, Jane Catherine Shaw, who scripted and directed the piece, has an idea to convince us of but not a story to tell us. Consequently, what the audience witnesses for an hour is a lecture in theatrical trappings rather than a fully realized work of theater. Read more
Three Sisters Come and Go (Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett & Julia Kristeva) -- According to an explanatory note included in the press kit, Three Sisters Come And Go "investigates the relationship between loss and desire, and the creative process as a path to joy..." Read more
TRACES/fades (Lenora Champagne) -- The moments I found most touching were the ones ungussied by "theatrical device" and "author's message," such as when Nettie complains to Delores about how her getting-older body is thickening in the middle, and Delores responds, straight and acerbic, with "That's nothing. Just wait. Everything hurts." Read more
Victory at the Dirt Palace (Adriano Shaplin) -- "Victory at the Dirt Palace" is cerebrally interesting and sometimes culturally provoking, but it never goes beyond its own cleverness and bombast, in the end not looking or sounding very different from the celebratized superficial culture which it aims to demolish by parody. Read more
The Wonder (Susanna Centlivre) -- The all-female cast of The Queen's Company (with a mission of creating "innovative productions of classical plays featuring all-female ethnically diverse casts") create a production that captures the play's bawdy and comedic thrust but doesn't quite tap into the darker undertones of Centlivre's story of two women seeking freedom for themselves in a patriarchal society. Read more
Zombie (Bill Connington) -- What are we to make of "Zombie," a one-actor piece about Quentin P., the queer sadistic sexual-psychopathic murderer who yearned to create a zombie who would obey him without question by performing home-made lobotomies with an icepick rammed up through his victims' eye-sockets? Read more