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Todd Haimes Theatre

Yellow Face

October 21, 2024

Clearly, Hwang’s playwright-within-the-play has been on a colorful journey, full of characters that amuse, anger and move him.  Hwang’s genius here is his ability to spin his real life into a fascinatingly entertaining work using all these events and characters.  He is artful in balancing the lighthearted with the sardonic and the dramatic, the result being a colorful portrait. The flier for "Yellow Face" shows its handsome star Daniel Dae Kim holding a mask of his smiling face away from his own scowling visage, a witty take on the Greek Comedy/Drama masks, a shorthand for "Yellow Face"’s richness.  Of course, having Daniel Dae Kim in the central role embodies his character with depth and subtlety. [more]

Home

June 18, 2024

No matter where you grew up, that place always elicits a tangled mix of memories, including sorrows that were often beyond one's control. That's certainly true for Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles), the Black protagonist of "Home" who endures a particularly powerless coming of age in lawfully segregated North Carolina. The play, which earned Tony Award-nominated success on Broadway, in 1980, after a critically acclaimed downtown run, was revived Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in 2008 as part of a season-long tribute to the Negro Ensemble Company, the artistic home of "Home" and its author Samm-Art Williams. Sadly, he passed away right before previews began for his sensitive work's current and only Broadway reappearance, a beautiful production that has now also turned into a fitting memorial. [more]

Doubt: A Parable

March 21, 2024

In this Roundabout/Scott Ellis production, Amy Ryan’s Sister Aloysius (stepping in for the originally cast Tyne Daly) comes across as less absolute in her suspicions while Liev Schreiber’s Flynn is less wavering than was the more nervous O’Byrne.  Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that, unlike the original casting, Schreiber is physically more imposing than Ryan making her seem more like a small creature attempting to take down much larger prey. The current production, brilliantly and realistically designed by David Rockwell and costumed by Linda Cho, has a more human feel than the original which, unfortunately, makes the play’s last scene less effective.  The war Sister Aloysius imposes on her church and school becomes more a battle of old against new and the lack of power of nuns versus the entitled males of the Catholic Church. [more]

Copyright Jack Quinn, 2001-2023