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 2/08/12 9:43am

theater

Goldberg and Adam Driver not all that sure what they're talking about. (Roundabout Theatre Company)

Look Back in Anger: Rebels Without a Cause

The arrival of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s revolutionary play about anger, decay and the rage simmering beneath the surface of British losers in the 1950s, revolutionized play writing and marked the beginning of a new decade of torn T-shirts and kitchen-sink misery on the London stage and the end of the well-written, elegantly staged works of Terence Rattigan, Enid Bagnold and Noël Coward. It was hailed as an important work when it opened in 1956 at the small, experimental Royal Court Theatre off Sloane Square, an alternative to the glossy productions in the West End. It was filled with hell and fury and shouted obscenities, a “protest” play unlike any slice of realism ever witnessed by refined London audiences weaned on Ibsen and Shaw. The excitement faded fast. By the time it was turned into a film of sweat, grief and brimstone in 1958 starring a young, virile Richard Burton, its time had passed. The movie was a flop and Look Back in Anger was toothless history. Mr. Osborne was credited (and cursed) with shuttering the complacency of well-ordered British dramaturgy. Time has now born witness to a desperate need to bring back Rattigan, Coward and the others. And not a moment to soon. Read More

By Rex Reed 11/22/11 10:34am

theater

Rickman, center.

Alan Rickman Teaches the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Writers Workshops in Seminar

I’ve never been a fan of Alan Rickman’s tight-lipped, prissy-mouthed acting style, but sometimes he picks a role that fits like a knee-high nylon sock, in a play that suits his nasal, slanty-eyed mannerisms with the sound of two hands clapping instead of one. The result in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, at the Golden, is a blessing. In fact, the entire cast of five is a marvel of well-oiled introspection, which is certainly a good thing, because without them, the enjoyable but often untidy and uneven play would be nothing more than a lot of clever one-liners. Read More