Enda Walsh

The Same

February 20, 2022

Lisa and The Other Lisa are the two characters in acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s haunting short play, "The Same." The conceit that The Other Lisa is Lisa 10 years ago is soon discerned. That’s achieved through Mr. Walsh’s alluring dialogue and stirring reveries which combine the poetic, the mundane and the cryptic. By the end of 47 entrancing minutes, one has experienced Lisa’s life in Ireland with its high points and disappointments. [more]

Sing Street

December 27, 2019

By stripping the story of local color—even the projections show little but an anonymous seascape—the creative team does ill by "Sing Street. " Take away the Irish accents, the 1980’s songs and a quick reference to The Famine, and this story of alienated teens could have taken place in Boise, Idaho, or Buenos Aires, Argentina. Let’s face it, the let’s-put-together-a-band-to-solve-our-problems was even a common theme in MGM films of the forties! (The original "Sing Street" movie, of course, was filmed in Dublin and was filled to the brim with local color and the grimness of economic distress.) [more]

Disco Pigs

January 18, 2018

John Haidar’s energized production turns this material into a tour de force for Campbell and Lynch who are continually moving about spewing volumes of words, almost choreographed by movement director Naomi Said. Deeply in character, they seem to be living their adventures which include humor, fantasy and violence. However, American audiences will have difficulty with the thick Cork accents and Irish slang, as well as Pig and Runt’s private language which often resembles baby talk when it doesn’t sound like street poetry. [more]

Lazarus

December 25, 2015

Although this is the eighth show minimalist director Ivo van Hove has directed for New York Theatre Workshop, one would be hard put to recognize it as his. The production uses Tal Yarden’s almost continual streaming video, slide projections, a huge screen representing a television monitor, and an on-stage band made of seven musicians. The pink beige set is often turned into other locales with video which covers all three walls of the set. The band sits behind the set but is often revealed when Venetian blinds on the back wall of Newton’s apartment occasionally open for actors to be seen behind the windows or for the video to transform the stage like cinematic cuts into scenes from various locales. Like Roeg’s movie version of "The Man Who Fell to Earth," Lazarus makes use of surrealistic imagery that gives the evening a psychedelic sensibility. [more]