By Rex Reed 3/28/12 8:39am

theater

Scroggins and Strolle in The Big Meal

The Big Meal: Whose Role Is it Anyway?

What happened to Playwrights Horizons? Once a bastion of the best and brightest new plays in the New York theater, this noble company has turned into a wobbly showcase for the kind of experimental writing that lives and dies in workshop productions on college campuses in Vermont. Having barely survived a pointless farrago of office politics called Assistance, I have now squirmed my way through The Big Meal, a boring case history of family life as symbolically reflected through three generations of revolting looking menu items that six adults and two children must consume until their plates are empty. The play has been quickly erased from my memory, but the heartburn lingers on. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/29/12 9:08am

theater

Esper and Kull in Assistance, of which the play offers little.

Assistance: Office Dramedy as Tedious as the 9-to-5 Trudge

Playwrights Horizons, the esteemed theater group now located in Theatre Row on West 42nd Street, has, through the years, presented some of New York’s most rewarding and celebrated plays. Assistance, a curiosity about office slaves who work for bosses they hate, written by a Los Angeles-based writer named Leslye Headland, is not one of them.

The best thing about Assistance, which would be better off in an experimental showcase than showcased in an experimental full-scale production, is that it is over in 90 minutes without an intermission. Read More

By Jesse Oxfeld 9/15/10 1:09am

Who’s Confused by Edward Albee?

“You’re confusing them,” the character called simply Dr. says of the audience during the first act of Me, Myself & I, the new Edward Albee play, which opened at Playwrights Horizons Sunday night. “And a confused audience is not an attentive one, I read somewhere.”

“Oh?” replies Mother, with whom Dr. has shared a bed Read More

By Jesse Oxfeld 12/09/09 1:15am

Make Way for Mamet the Didact!

David Mamet’s new play is here! The play that was to be Mamet, back in classic Mamet form! With a plot so incendiary that nothing about it could be revealed before performances started! With its poster and Playbill cover featuring only a simple, sexy shot of a shapely black woman’s legs in a slinky, red-sequined Read More

By Jesse Oxfeld 9/17/09 1:31pm

Revenge Fantasy Theater

At some point, and soon, even the most dedicated students of 20th-century Jewish history are going to consider their entertainment options and say, “Enough already with the Holocaust stories.”

In the 60-odd years since V-E Day, we’ve seen War and Remembrance and Shoah, Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List, The Diary of Anne Frank and Read More

By Gillian Reagan 6/24/08 5:44pm

Dylan McDermott Joins Playwright Horizons' Changes

Dylan McDermott, the still-smokin’ Golden Globe-winning actor (familiar as Bobby Donnell on The Practice) has joined the cast of the Playwrights Horizons’ Three Changes. He will star opposite Maura Tierney; together they play an Upper West Side couple named Nate and Laurel. They live comfortably until Nate’s Hollywood brother Hal pays them a visit and Read More

By John Heilpern 4/06/98 12:00am

The Case Against Drabinsky And Lincoln Center

I regret singling out Lincoln Center Theater for some harsh criticism. As André Bishop, Lincoln Center’s well-liked artistic director, put it when I spoke to him a few days ago: Life’s tough enough.

But what concerns me is the surprising news that Lincoln Center has joined forces with Garth Drabinsky-whose company, Livent Inc., produced Ragtime Read More