
In the first beat of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (now in a luminous revival, directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tr…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:59PM[SHARE]According to Edward Albee, the title of his 1980 play “The Lady from Dubuque” (in revival at the Signature Theatre Company, under the skillful direction of David Esbjornson) owe…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Noël Coward claimed that his life was “one long extravaganza”; as if to prove it, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ “Star Quality: The World o…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]For an essay in the magazine on the fiftieth anniversary of the first production of "Death of a Salesman," I visited Arthur Miller at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1999. With his wife…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 03:49PM[SHARE]John Osborne’s rowdy, shocking anger—first broadcast in his play “Look Back in Anger,” which is now in revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about h…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]The most underrated of Shakespeare’s many theatrical gifts—poetic, tragic, festive—is his tabloid mentality. Shakespeare knew the value of the sensational: ghosts, gore, an…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]As a stagestruck boy, Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]All fans of the American musical who are sick of boulevard nihilism, movie retreads, choreographic cliché, dopey lyrics, and banal librettos, your ship has come in: “Shlemiel the …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]8220;Circumstances make man, not man circumstances,” Mark Twain once quipped. As proof of his claim, take the smart, well-intentioned collection of political operatives who intervene i…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Alan Rickman is the go-to actor for supercilious. Over the years, in screen roles as various as the Sheriff of Nottingham in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” Colonel Brandon in …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]On September 21, 2009, three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Nina Arianda, like most ambitious actresses just out of drama school, was making the rounds in New York, looking for work. …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]8220;Ravishing” is the best word for Stephen Karam’s new comedy “Sons of the Prophet” (elegantly directed by Peter DuBois, at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels). At o…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]Martin Luther King, Jr., may have had a dream, but it was not to be the subject of a Broadway show. Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” (directed by Kenny Leon, at the Bernard …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]For the nearly two decades between his first hit, “French Without Tears” (1936), and his 1954 play “Separate Tables,” Terence Rattigan was the West End’s most s…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM[SHARE]

