Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Theater Review (NYC): Re-Entry by Emily Ackerman and KJ Sanchez (Urban Stages)

The problem with all movie, television, video game, and other media views of war, as Re-Entry’s Joseph Harrell asserts from the start, is that it inevitably provides, at best, a two-dimensional detached view of a world that is very much real for those who experience it. Like those other arts, theater cannot simulate the battlefield, [...]

Theater Review (NYC): Princes of Waco by Robert Askins

From the start of Princes of Waco, it’s pretty clear that Robert Askins is writing about what he knows. The 29-year old Houston native has a smoothness in his Texas dialogue that comes from a native speaker, and the play streams so comfortably through the ins and out of the mythology of Texas and the [...]

Theater Review (NYC): The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill (Irish Rep)

There’s little doubt in my mind that 2009 was the best year in recent memory for the revival of straight plays in New York City, and the year was bookended by two of the very best. In January, vaunted Chicago import Our Town turned what had always been a more intelligent play than its reputation [...]

Theater Review (NYC) American Treasure by Julia Jarcho

13P Started as a collective of mid-level playwrights (e.g. regional and off-Broadway level) who were unsatisfied with the workshop process. It’s interesting to watch that mission apply to American Treasure, which feels like a good play that would have been great with more workshopping. American Treasure is one of the few plays I’ve seen that [...]

Theater Review (NYC) – The Lesser Seductions of History by August Schulenberg

An adjustment of America’s attitudes toward the sixties has been long overdue, and while Mad Men may be reminding people of how the adult world worked in the face of turbulence, August Schulenberg’s The Lesser Seductions of History gets with the fresh faced college grads, caught in between the choices of the larger world and [...]