GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. The American dream is a swindle, an overpriced parcel of Florida swampland peddled by shark-eyed salesmen. David Mamet’s message is sour, but his ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is monstrously entertaining. A 1984 Pulitzer prizewinner.
THE HUMAN COMEDY. William Saroyan’s novel of homespun Americana packed little wallop as the book for this pop cantata, but the profligate melodiousness of Galt MacDermot’s score and a dozen engaging actors just about sent audiences humming and floating out of the theater.
HURLYBURLY. The evil of banality: this is the subject of David Rabe’s comedy of modern bad manners. His men are Peter Pan’s lost boys grown older but not up; his women are resilient rag dolls. Director Mike Nichols and an exemplary cast evoke these dead souls with compassionate intelligence.
LAUGHING STOCK. At 54, Romulus Linney remains one of the American theater’s mysteriously buried treasures. In this off-Broadway evening of three short plays, especially the masterly centerpiece F.M., Linney exhibited deft portraits of the half mad in which not a line was misplaced or wasted.
MAMA I WANT TO SING. Amateur night in Harlem, or heaven (see story above).
THE MISS FIRECRACKER CONTEST. Holly Hunter, a strumpet-elf in tap shoes, walks onstage and twirls a rifle to the Star-Spangled Banner. Neither she nor Author Beth Henley misfires in this small-town carnival of a comedy.
THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP. This perfect travesty raids Jane Eyre, Poe and mummy movies. Everett Quinton and Playwright-Director Charles Ludlam perform all eight roles, some in drag, some simultaneously, with manic precision.
THE REAL THING. Aristocrats of style polish their epigrams and tiptoe into one another’s penthouse souls in Tom Stoppard’s Cowardian comedy. And Actor Jeremy Irons finds an intelligent heart throbbing with domestic passion.
ROCKABY. In two stunning short plays by Samuel Beckett, Footfalls and Rockaby, daft old women lull themselves to death with monologues of sere poetry. This explorer of the darkest human emotions found in Actress Billie Whitelaw the ideal interpreter of his spectral campfire tales.
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. If you loved the painting, you’ll like the show. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine based their Broadway musical on Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and found subterranean seisms of feeling: hostile, wistful, possessed.
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