Reviewing the Drama: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Ballet, Movies, and TV Reviews

Our Mother's Brief Affair seems likes a fairly straightforward title. And while most of the action of Richard Greenberg 's play finds the titular mother, Anna, telling her children, Seth and Abby, about her brief affair with her lover, that's not exactly what this memory play is about. Rather, playwright Greenberg ( The Assembled Parties ) is more interested in why the mother recounts the affair the way she does. We begin with Seth ( Greg Keller , Of Good Stock ) giving us tidbits of his mother's personality. Anna ( Linda Lavin , Too Much Sun ) is there to confirm and recreate the tableaux Seth sets up. Greenberg structures the play so that we continually shift between direct addresses, with everyone telling us what happened and how things were, and fully played-out scenes, with everyone showing us what happened and how things were. (Director Lynne Meadow ( Collected Stories ) stages the play so that's it easy to keep track.) Early on, Seth says his mothers...

Bruce Norris likes to write characters who stir the pot, and Jeremy Shamos is terrific at playing them. Re-teaming with their Clybourne Park director, Tony winner Pam MacKinnon  ( Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ), they bring us The Qualms , Norris's new play about sexual politics. Shamos plays Chris, a sort of everyman, he seems like an average, middle-aged white guy. Chris is married to Kristy ( Sarah Goldberg ), a sweet-looking blonde with alabaster skin, and the newlyweds are at Gary ( John Procaccino ) and Teri ( Kate Arrington ( Grace ))'s beach condo. The couples met recently while on vacation in Mexico, and Chris and Kristy have decided to accept Gary and Teri's invitation to join their swingers club. Playing out in real time, the other members of the club begin to arrive: There's Deb (Donna Lynne Champlin), an overweight, average looking woman, and her boyfriend, Ken ( Andy Lucien ), a black man who is cut like an Adonis and carries himself in an...

Some of my favorite movies and TV episodes start at the end, or at least not at the beginning. They start with a scene that happens toward the end of our story and then kick us back to the beginning so we can figure how we arrived at the known conclusion. And so I was instantly engaged at the start of Craig Wright’s new play Grace , which begins and end by asking, “Can we go back?” In Grace (directed with precision by Dexter Bullard), Sara (Kate Arrington) and Steve (Paul Rudd) have moved down to Florida (from Minnesota) in order to open a chain of gospel-themed hotels. Their neighbor is Sam (Michael Shannon), who is grieving the loss of his fiance and healing from the accident that took her life and nearly took his. (The neighbors’ exterminator is Karl (Ed Asner), a device of a character who helps develop the other characters.) Steve is not a "knower," he’s a believer. That’s what brought him to his faith and what also proves to be his tragic flaw. Think about it:...