plays – The News Desk

Snatch Adams, a six-foot-tall walking vagina working as a red-nose clown, would usually be entertaining folks on the vaudevillian “Borsch” Belt comedy circuit—“borsch” as in (a)bort(ion)—but extremists have been closing Planned Parenthoods. There’s certainly not a lot of other things an unemployed, six-foot-tall vagina-clown can do. Start a podcast? Launch a wellness app? Snatch (Becca Blackwell) and their dear friend Tainty McCracken (Amanda Duarte) experience a flicker of confusion, but then the right idea strikes like a period on a day you’re wearing white pants: air a TV talk show called “It’s That Time of the Month,” which mashes together the best of Conan O’Brien, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and performance artist Carolee Schneemann in her “Interior Scroll” era.Heretofore, the comic and ...

In Oslo, in September, I attended the preview of Jon Fosse’s play, “I Svarte Skogen Inne” (“Inside the Black Forest”). The theatre was small and dark, without a stage, and the scenery was minimal: a large illuminated rock in the middle, some scattered trees, and the audience members, many of whom were seated in folding chairs ringed around the rock. A trumpeter entered first, blowing long, melancholy notes, followed by a young man. The man explained that he had gone for a drive and, when his car had stalled, he had wandered into the woods. It grew darker and colder, and the audience heard the voices of an older man and an older woman speak about the young man, expressing their distress at the direction his life had taken. Then, without warning, a young woman appeared.She was called a youn...

Tag: plays

High Camp and High Tragedy in Two Electrifying Off-Broadway Productions

Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named