Word: off-broadway
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...testing to escape the boom-or-bust cycle on Broadway, where high operating costs all but demand that shows have ecstatic reviews or a huge advance sale to survive. Rappaport started as a production of the Seattle Repertory Theater. Next, that company's artistic director, Daniel Sullivan, staged it off-Broadway in June. Word of mouth built, and so did sales. Late last month Rappaport transferred to Broadway, where it takes its place as the funniest and most touching play yet this season. --By William A. Henry...
Curse of the Starving Class, a 1977 Shepard work, has been powerfully revived off-Broadway in a production that demonstrates it may be his best play. Shepard charts with savage humor the cruelties exchanged among a grindingly poor rural family. Slaughtering their animals has inured them to violence. Sharing the isolation of farm life has made them eager to sneak off. Knowing one another's sore spots has only rendered their aim more deadly. The plot resembles the save-the-homestead movies released last year: the farm is hopelessly insolvent but is sought by developers. Shepard, however, does not indulge...
...your pardon. If you were to push ahead of him in line, he might offer to hold your briefcase. He is, in short, the round little guy with the slightly comical face you have seen in such movies as Manhattan and Lovesick, and he almost apologizes for having written Off-Broadway's newest hit, Aunt Dan & Lemon. "At the risk of sounding self-pitying, the project taxed my resources to the limit and sometimes beyond," he says. "It took more brains than I had, and to figure out how to write it, I had to borrow some of next year...
...Maybe we're not supposed to sleep so well," says a character in Doubt. To be sure, this off-Broadway hit that has just moved to Broadway (nabbing a Pulitzer Prize along the way) never lets us rest comfortably with our preconceptions. An imperious nun (Cherry Jones) hears suspicions that a popular priest (Brķan F. O'Byrne) at her school has been abusing a young boy; in spite of his fierce denials, she hounds him to step down. A triumph of moral doggedness or a shameful injustice? In a tight 90 mins., Shanley's work packs more complexity, humanity...
...triangle ensues. But all is not as it seems. LaBute usually shows the impossibility of men connecting with women; here he shows the implacability of racism that lurks in the heart of even nice guys. Ben Stiller, Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Peet star in George C. Wolfe's crackling off-Broadway production of a daring playwright's best play. --By Richard Zoglin