Jen Silverman

The Roommate

September 19, 2024

Of course, with Farrow and LuPone under the direction of six-time Tony Award winner Jack O’Brien, this is an occasion for cheering although this comedy drama, a cross between a female version of "The Odd Couple" and "Breaking Bad" is both predictable and razor thin. However, it is also a scenario for two consummate actresses to strut their stuff. The roles are not a great stretch for either of them – Farrow has often played grown-up waifs and LuPone has often been seen in recent years as a New York sophisticate, but these are the kind of performers that hold your attention at all times, making you afraid to look away and miss anything. [more]

Spain

December 13, 2023

Until now it has been believed that the 1937 Joris Ivens-Ernest Hemingway documentary "The Spanish Earth" was paid for by a corporation called Contemporary Historians sponsored by some of the most famous liberal writers of the time: playwright Lillian Hellman, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, poet, screenwriter and essayist Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, poet Archibald MacLeish, novelists John Dos Passos and Hemingway. However, in "Spain," contemporary playwright Jen Silverman has another idea: what if this famously propaganda film was financed by the KGB and that filmmaker Ivens and his girlfriend/editor Helen van Dongen were agents for KGB operatives in New York? [more]

Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties

September 19, 2018

The actual subtitle of Silverman’s play gives one pause: “In Essence, A Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were in Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Antarctic?; Imagine the Antarctic as Pussy and It’s Sort of Like That.” While this might suggest that the play is overwritten and self-indulgent, it belies the concise, tight writing and structure of Silverman’s comic/angry play which is always surprising, always inventive, always inducing laughter. The play does use Brechtian supertitles to announce the scenes but these are comic and informative, rather than didactic or preachy. [more]

The Moors

March 18, 2017

Although the play demonstrates a surface knowledge of the genre and the period, it wants to have it both ways: it takes place in 1840 in a desolate mansion on the Yorkshire Moors but the characters talk and behave as though it is the present. It appears to be making a feminist statement by making all the members of the household female but has nothing new to say on the subject other than as a variation on these famous novels. And it attempts to be funny but isn’t clever or surprising enough to trigger much laughter. [more]