“Leave the gun,” Jackie, the volatile, recovering-addict ex-con at the center of The Motherf**ker With the Hat, is told halfway through the play. “Take the empanadas.”
It’s a throwaway line, but a sharp and clever one: exactly right for the moment; a riff on The Godfather, another work about New Yorkers on the edges of Read More
The New York Sun sat down with Anna Shapiro, the director of Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County. She won the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for best direction of a play. But now she’s up for best director at the Tony Awards.
Only four women have received that honor: Read More
At the start of every new season, I say a silent prayer. It goes like this:
“Please God, let the season be different from all other seasons. Please don’t let it be dominated by any more revivals, British actors and Eve Ensler. Please get them to bring the price of tickets down and make all Read More
This collection of 20 recent essays by Cynthia Ozick begins with a memorial appreciation of Susan Sontag. It’s noble and notable that Ms. Ozick should appreciate Sontag, a vanquishing rival for literary reputation and, equally to the point, a liberal emanating from the old Partisan Review, while Ms. Ozick stands with the Commentary crowd Read More
Colson Whitehead’s third novel could be called a black comedy, if not for the unfortunate pun: This black comedy is partly about being black. It’s also about brand names. Branding and blackness run in very odd tandem, since one is a chosen process and thought to be superficial yet lingeringly consequential, and the other—also a Read More
This is a book that people will find cute and charming—or it’s a book they’ll find cloying and false and illiterate. Since it comes garlanded in endorsements from accomplished writers and a movie star, too (Lucinda Rosenfeld, Nell Freudenberger, Sam Lipsyte—and Claire Danes), I expect many reviewers to go for option No. 1 and Read More
The inability to make a decision turns out to be a rich comic subject.
I think.
In any case, it’s the problem of Dwight Wilmerding, the likably indecisive narrator of Indecision. One may wonder why someone likable has to be saddled with such a name (though maybe not, coming from an author stuck with Kunkel), Read More
