Many people think of farce as a lesser genre than tragedy or even thoughtful comedy, because with farce there’s no focus on theme, subtext or characterization. But putting together a workable farce takes a lot of wit and ingenuity. Every piece of action has to be perfectly timed so that…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Racism persists, but the ways in which we feel and express it change with the times — as exemplified in Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park. The play was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, at the end of which the Youngers, a struggling black family, are about…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Anne Nelson, a journalism professor, wrote The Guys very soon after 9/11, and the play closely follows her own experiences. Like her protagonist, Joan, Nelson could think of no real way to contribute — plumbers were needed, Joan tells us, but not intellectuals — until she learned of a fire…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Eight gay men assemble for three summer weekends at a beautiful upstate New York house in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! Tellingly, the place is called Manderley. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” begins Daphne du Maurier’s spooky novel Rebecca, and there are echoes of her prose…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

The opening scene of Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful is intriguing: a woman tied to a chair, a mobster with a gun preparing to finish her off. The tension is ready-made, and the dialogue comically and continually upends our expectations. The woman, Margaret, is feisty, scoffing at the very idea of a…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Adam, an undergraduate, encounters free-spirited graduate student Evelyn (note the names, please) while working as a guard at the university art museum. Incensed by the town’s prudery, which dictated covering the genitalia of a statue of God himself with vine leaves, Evelyn is about to vandalize the piece by spray-painting…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Uncle Vanya is a challenge for any contemporary director, since most audience members won’t know what to make of all those talky Russians freely airing their deepest desires and despairs, periodically insulting each other, occasionally bursting through with declarations of unrequited love — and all this without the upbeat, therapeutic…

In its portrayal of corporate ruthlessness, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was pretty daring for its time. Back in 1961, when it premiered on Broadway, a lot of people still admired the business world. The musical shows an ambitious young man, J. Pierrepont Finch, angling his way…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Jake has always been a batterer — when he was a boy, he stomped a little goat he loved — and he always feels terrible afterward, alternating between denial and a crippling sense of guilt and grief. As A Lie of the Mind opens, we hear a voice talking in…

A Touch of Spring starts out as such a charming romantic comedy that it’s a shame when it dissolves into a diffuse and wordy second act. Samuel Taylor’s rarely performed 1968 play has one foot in the ’50s (it’s set in 1959) and another in the late ’60s, that era…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

An early Shakespeare play based on a Roman comedy (Plautus’s The Menaechmi), The Comedy of Errors utilizes a lot of plot devices that were hoary even in Shakespeare’s time — although naturally, they’re at least used deftly. As the play opens, Egeon, a Merchant of Syracuse, has been captured in…

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…