Word: yorking
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...Donald Margulies' new Broadway offering, Time Stands Still, to take a typical example, won warm praise from most critics, but I found its alternately jokey and sanctimonious portrayal of a photojournalist and her war-correspondent boyfriend one giant media-friendly cliché. And I had to laugh at New York Times critic Ben Brantley's praise of Next Fall, Geoffrey Nauffts' new comedy-drama about a gay couple at odds over religion, as "that genuine rara avis, a smart, sensitive and utterly contemporary New York comedy...
Come again? From where I sit, smart, sensitive, utterly contemporary New York comedies are virtually all we get these days: plays populated by the same modern, upper-middle-class urban sophisticates who, for the most part, are sitting in the audience. What you rarely get - but do in When the Rain Stops Falling, an extraordinary new play by Australian Andrew Bovell now having its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater - is something that really throws the audience out of its comfort zone. This challenging play has the most complicated time-shifting dramatic structure I've seen...
Gabriel Law, the Londoner, has been raised by his mother ever since the abrupt departure of his father when he was just a boy. Gabrielle York, the Australian, has endured the murder of her 8-year-old brother and the subsequent suicide, years apart, of both her parents. The two meet at a roadhouse in Australia, fall in love and unravel some unexpected connections...
David Cromer - the Chicago-based director who won acclaim for his recent off-Broadway revival of Our Town - handles all this with sensitivity and solemnity. (This is a real rara avis in New York theater: a play without laughs.) A cast of mostly Americans (among them Mary Beth Hurt and Victoria Clark) conveys the British and Australian milieus with as much authenticity as you're likely to find on these shores. The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater, and easily the best new play of the year...
Sokolov, like many of the top critics from his generation, suffers from "back in the day"-itis. "Nobody [is] ever going to be as influential as the Times critics of the '60s and '70s," he says. (New York's Gael Greene can be counted upon to say the same thing whenever asked.) But the kind of influence the Times had in the '70s was hardly worth having. A few thousand urban mandarins depended on its reviews, and proceeded to agree or disagree. Restaurants didn't matter in the culture the way they do now. Ordinary Americans west of the Hudson...