Theater for the New City
Love Doomed in the Havana Harbor
In 1939, Cuba’s Batista government sent the SS St. Louis back to Germany, where its passengers were put to death. This shameful event provides the backstory for a new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz.
Lesbian Tearoom Before Its Time
MacDougal Street today can hardly be described as paradise. Crammed with NYU students jostling for falafel, or the bridge-and-tunnel crowd fighting for a seat at Panchito’s, it’s difficult to picture the street as a hub of subversion and artistry. But once upon a time, it was.
Family Drama Unnecessarily Absurd
Photo by Jonathan Slaff
A Wedding and a Funeral at Theater for the New City
A wedding or a funeral, which is more important? That’s the main question in the upcoming American premiere of “Winter Wedding” by the renowned Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin, co- translated by David Willinger and Laurel Hessing. The play, opening at Theater for the New City on May 5 and running through May 22, is a dark comedy about the clash between two major life events and the wild family drama that ensues.
A Disappointing Dybbuk
It’s a pretty familiar theme — the Jew as a perpetual wanderer, forever a foreigner, friendless and reviled by all. Is there anyone else so existentially homeless, utterly without place on the planet as the Jew? Who, besides the Jew, is so intolerable to his host that he becomes the target of violent threats, which necessarily culminate in expulsion and annihilation?
Eli Wallach: Great Jewish Actor, Now and Forever
On February 22, this year’s annual benefit for Theater For The New City’s Emerging Playwrights Program at the National Arts Club honors acting couple Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, which seems only natural. In 2005, Wallach released his delightful autobiography “The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage,” but at 94, Brooklyn-born Wallach is neither in his dotage nor his anecdotage.