It’s hard to believe Jon Stewart has time to spare before the presidential election, but for the fourth year running, he’s hosting his Night of Too Many Stars benefit, an apolitical gathering devoted to raising money for autism research. Funny people (Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Seth Rogen, Jerry Seinfeld) and, Read More
“Every time you hear the word vagina, drink!” commanded opening act, Mamie Gummer.
The audience, mainly female—go figure—responded with the obedient clinking, and subsequent sinking, of glasses that reverberated through Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. And vagina was indeed the theme of the evening at These Girls, Glamour’s night of monologues by young ladies they’ve deemed the new generation of female voices.
It quickly became apparent that for all involved (Olivia Wilde, Leandra Medine, Rashida Jones, Zosia Mamet, Aubrey Plaza and Lauren Miller), this was a chance to have a real heart-to-heart—you know, girl talk—so far from their usual introverted selves.
“Tonight, these girls can be who they uniquely are fan-fucking-tastic,” exclaimed Gloria Steinem.
It was refreshing, we suppose, though The Observer did feel a tinge of sympathy for the few men in the audience. Read More
Three-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep announced last night her donation of $1 million to the Public Theater, the company at which she got an early start on the New York stage. “I give this gift in honor of the founder of The Public Theater, my friend and mentor Joseph Papp, and in Read More
“We have a Shakespearean, Elizabethean temper,” Al Pacino informed a seated crowd Monday evening in Central Park. As part of its 50th Anniversary Gala, the Public Theater was honoring Mr. Pacino with an award, in the form of a prop rapier he had once wielded on stage, “I’m a little nervous,” he laughed. “I wish I had water, but I have a sword,” Read More
Oh, Brooklyn. In Bloomberg-era New York, where the Upper West Side is for strollers, the West Village for Marc Jacobs, and the Lower East Side for pub crawls, Brooklyn is the place, we’re told time and again, for unconventional, creative young people to be unconventional and creative. It’s the borough where you’d find, for example, a sprawling, dilapidated, commune-like home shared by a novelist, a few poets, a composer, an opera singer, a European-refugee activist and a burlesque artist, all pulled together by a fiction editor and self-styled aesthete who lounges in caftans, planning parties.
February House, a splendid new musical at the Public Theater, is set in that commune-like home, and among its many achievements is to remind us that, despite what we’ve been told by innumerable New York magazine covers, Styles section features, and Lena Dunham, Brooklyn-as-bohemia is not a recent invention. This creative home was a real one—a house, granted, not an illegal loft, in Brooklyn Heights rather than Bushwick—and in 1940 and ’41 it was occupied by W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others. They wrote, sang, drank, danced, slept with each other, avoided paying rent and sniffed cocaine in back bedrooms at parties. They worked on their art, and themselves; they talked about art, and themselves; and amid all the chaos, they didn’t seem to get very much done. As the Brooklyn-frequenting if not actually Brooklynite David Byrne might note: Same as it ever was.
Their stories unfold—loves and heartbreak, artistic failures and triumphs, arguments about the artist’s political obligations in a world on the brink of war—in a haunting, minor-key production propelled by the character of George Davis (Julian Fleisher, a bald, nebbishy leading man charismatically campy and wonderfully wistful), the flamboyantly gay editor and erstwhile novelist who has assembled the house’s residents and dedicated himself to their care and feeding. February House, as 7 Middagh Street was dubbed because so many who lived there were born in that short month, is his work of art, his masterpiece. Read More
As you enter the capacious quarters of the Public Theater in the East Village, you walk through a construction site: a grand building being torn out from the inside. The space is currently undergoing renovations, but still acts as the primary location for the eighth year of Under the Radar, New York’s downtown experimental theater festival, which runs through Jan. 15.
This feeling of restoration never seems to leave as you become privy to the rich, eclectic and fiercely original performances the two weeks has to offer. Experimental theater, by definition, avoids convention, often leaving audiences questioning the value of the genre. But doubters must make the trip downtown: the offerings are impressive and remarkably diverse, including media like video, music, dance and puppetry, produced by companies based in Europe and America. Read More
Compulsion, the new play by Rinnie Groff that opened Thursday at the Public Theater, is a strange piece of work. What is at base a fairly straightforward and essentially true story-frustrated writer goes mad-is simultaneously many different tales rolled into one. It’s about obsession, about paranoia, about writing and creativity and ownership of ideas; it’s Read More
We’re happy here, for the most part, in our coastal bubble. We know, or at least we’re repeatedly told, on the cable-news stations and in political dialogue, that the rest of the country isn’t like us and doesn’t like us. We joke about how we sometimes visit “America,” in which we certainly don’t Read More
When The Black Keys first exploded out of Akron, Ohio with the release of their sophomore LP Thickfreakness back in April 2003, The White Stripes were at the top of their game. Elephant—the album that made Jack White and his ex-wife superstars—had been released the week before, and the Keys suffered from comparisons Read More
You might spot The Public Theater’s new top dog at the Delacorte’s opening night performance of Hair in Central Park tonight. Andrew D. Hamingson, former helmer of the Atlantic Theater Company, will make his first unofficial appearance in his new role as executive director of the Public at the rock musical.
Mr. Hamingson, 45, Read More
