Yana Biryukova

The Meeting: The Interpreter

August 5, 2024

Seemingly not trusting the material, director Brian Mertes has used all kinds of stage gimmicks including having the two actors photographed live by a team of three videographers whose equipment runs on a track around one side of the stage while a huge screen covers the second half on which we see the actions of Wood and Curran blown up to one story high. (Aside from the distraction, those who sit in the audience on stage left may find this blocks part of their view.) The meeting at Trump Tower which precipitates the ostensible action is played by the two actors and six miniature (nude!) puppets by famed designer Julian Crouch. At various points the two actors enter a booth in the back of the stage for no explained reason, as if in a session at the United Nations. There is also unexplained dancing and singing that seems to have little to do with the events at hand. [more]

Small Acts of Daring Invention

May 15, 2024

If the play's goal is to pay homage to Wright, it misses the mark for most audiences. If one is unfamiliar with Wright, most of the symbols revealed in the play will not be understood in terms of her life story. This fact is not necessarily a distraction from the action since the play provides a suitable level of mystery, imagination, and surprise, resulting in an entertaining but possibly unsettling experience, starting with the opening and carrying through to a satisfactory ending, all without spoken dialogue. [more]

Hart Island

March 13, 2022

Whether or not Tracy Weller’s "Hart Island" directly harkens back to Masters, it certainly has similarities, most particularly in its poetically rendered revelations of the underbelly of life and death. Weller turns Hart Island, impeccably rendered in Christopher & Justin Swader’s set occupying most of the Gym at Judson, into a dark metaphor revealing more than any statistics or headlines could ever do about existence during the Covid pandemic. Hart Island is where the bodies of indigent and anonymous people wind up, usually buried by prisoner work details from nearby Riker’s Island. Of course, during the last two years Hart Island’s necropolis has burgeoned both in reality and in Weller’s imagination as fertile in this time as Masters’ was in his. [more]

The Santa Closet

December 10, 2019

Houses on the Moon Theater Company’s delightful and earnest mission is to “dispel ignorance and isolation through the theatrical amplification of unheard voices.” "The Santa Closet," another one-man show written and performed by the company’s co-founder Jeffrey Solomon, doesn’t reach the lofty goals of some of his other plays; however, the newly updated, tenth-year anniversary production of this frothy, zany tale is nevertheless aloft with quite a few grins and chuckles. [more]

Selkie

December 7, 2018

“Why did I marry such an idiot?!” exclaims Deanna about her goofy husband Keaton. Not only is he an inept drug dealer but he has also kidnapped a seal who is presently in human form and her vengeful relatives are now on the warpath. These are the outlandish plot points of playwright Krista Knight's charming "Selkie" where mirth merges with darkness. [more]