Ken Urban Archives - TheaterScene.net

Ken Urban

A Guide for the Homesick

December 17, 2024

Director Shira Milikowsky keeps increasing the tension as the 85-minute play peels away revelation after revelation. Each man has a guilty secret and may have betrayed a friend which is eating him up. Although there are never more than two men on Lawrence Moten III’s pitch perfect set for the rather shabby blue and white hotel room which suggests a dorm, we eventually witness and learn about two other stories that they are both stewing over: what happened between Teddy and Ed before Ed stormed out and Jeremy’s encounter in Uganda with Nicholas, a gay man in need of more than medical help. [more]

Nibbler

March 6, 2017

Urban may have an admirable mission, in attempting to document the customary passage from youth to adulthood--or high-school to college, to be more precise--as he focuses on five graduating seniors in a middle-class suburb, in 1992, when one of them, Adam, remains behind, without any prospects for a glorious future. But the otherwise realistic play that unfolds quickly veers into surreal territory, as an alien from another planet enters their midst, and the eponymous “Nibbler” becomes ever more real a presence on stage, via a puppet, manipulated by several of the quite visible cast-members. [more]

Sense of an Ending

August 27, 2015

Mr. Urban does an excellent job of dramatizing and explaining a complex historical situation in this fictional treatment of a real case. In 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down. This assassination instigated a brutal tribal conflict between the majority Hutus who blamed Tutsi extremists for the death of the Hutu president. Varying estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. [more]