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Byline: CHARLES ISHERWOOD One by one, they make their confused, anxious, sometimes mysterious departures. Husband and wife, their two daughters and one daughter's boyfriend, a grandmother suffering from dementia, rolled [...]

So long once again, Daisy and Violet. See you around the Rialto in maybe another 20 years? ''Side Show,'' the heart-stirring musical about the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, [...]

Where and how to ring in the New Year is a perennial question. If you're feeling festive and want to make a full night of it, there are several theater-related [...]

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- In the right context conventional virtues have a way of gleaming like fresh seams of gold. The most satisfying production at the 33rd Humana Festival of New […]

Previews the Broadway comedy "Laugh Whore," by Mario Cantone, playing in New York City through the Christmas holidays. Direction of the comedy by Joe Mantello that retains a feeling of a club routine; Absence of structure and thematic design.

Previews the Broadway play "The Rivals," by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, starring Dana Ivey. Storyline of the comedy of manners, directed by Mark Lamos.

Reports on the performance of the drama "The Bald Soprano and the Lesson" in New York City.

Reports on the performance of the drama "Rose Rage" in New York City.

Comments on the drama "Slava's Snowshow" performed in New York City.

Reports on the performance of the drama "Hedda Gabler" in New York City.

Reports on the performance of the drama "Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" in New York City.

Features the drama "Lysistrata." Cast of characters; Plot of the drama.

The article reviews the theater festival of drama by women authors known as Women’s Voices Theater Festival in Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia) from September-November 2015, including the theatrical production of the "Queens Girl in the World," directed by Eleanor Holdridge, presented by the theater company Theater J and starring Dawn Ursula, "Cake Off," directed by Joe Calarco and starring Sherri L. Edelen, Todd Buonopane, Michael Kevin Darnall and "Animal," directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch starring Kate Eastwood Norris, Cody Nickell and Joel David Santner.

The article presents a review of playwright Annie Baker's play "John," directed by Sam Gold and starring Georgia Engel, Christopher Abbott, Hong Chau and Lois Smith, performed at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City showing through September 6, 2015.

The article focuses on the play "Journey's End," by R.S. Sherriff, as performed on Broadway in New York City during the spring of 2007, and comments on its failure to draw the crowds it could have expected because it will be the winner of a Tony award. The article suggests that this failure is due to the U.S. public's weariness with war.

The article presents information on two plays of the famous playwright, Richard Greenberg.

Reviews two plays. "Doubt," by John Patrick Shanley; "Pillowman," by Martin McDonagh.

Previews the play "Inky," performed by Jessi Campbell at Julia Miles Theater in New York on April 2005.

Comments on the play "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," directed by James Lapine.

The article offers information on the new project called WordPlay Shakespeare, created by the New Book Press, which offers series of plays written by William Shakespeare in electronic books (e-books) form.

ONE of the happier stories of the Broadway season, to be capped on Sunday night with the annual presentation of the Tony Awards, was the wealth of fine new plays. There's a story behind that story: the continuing importance of Off Broadway as the cultivating ground for America's best dramatists. All four of this year's nominees for best play -- ''Clybourne Park,''''Other Desert Cities,''''Peter and the Starcatcher'' and ''Venus in Fur'' -- were first produced Off Broadway. But it's worth noting, amid the glittery festivities, that some of the finest new playwriting to be seen Off Broadway is not necessarily Broadway-bound, and probably shouldn't be. The two most memorable plays I saw in New York this season, Stephen Karam's ''Sons of the Prophet'' and Amy Herzog's ''4000 Miles,'' were produced Off Broadway, and while there was talk of Mr. Karam's play -- a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize -- transferring to Broadway, I was almost relieved it didn't. Moving, funny and entertaining as ''Sons'' was, I feared its nuanced humanity might become diffused in a Broadway house. Heaven knows it's happened before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If you're going to have the chutzpah to call your show ''Shatner's World: We Just Live In It ...,'' it is probably wise to enter joking. William Shatner, who does not need an introduction to anyone who has made it to the second sentence of this review, does precisely that in the chatty, digressive and often amusing tour of his unusual acting career, which opened Thursday night at the Music Box Theater for a brief Broadway run. Despite the absurdly (joshingly?) self-aggrandizing title, Mr. Shatner shows a welcome tendency to poke fun at himself that anyone who has seen his commercials for the travel Web site Priceline.com will probably recognize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the stress of urban striving shredding your nerves? Do you fight the odd urge to throw the BlackBerry down the nearest manhole? Had it up to here with the overscheduled, information-saturated, distraction-filled frenzy that is contemporary American life? The smiling fellow in the slick suit, skinny tie and nifty hat has a proposition for you. Turn off the digital assistant, tune out the endless din and drop in to the friendly neighborhood depicted in the new play ''Maple and Vine,'' where social networking is a mere matter of inviting friends over for pigs in a blanket and crab puffs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A wedding is an easy peg to hang drama on, for reasons that hardly need much elaboration. Two words suffice: family togetherness. In ''We Live Here,'' a programmatic play by Zoe Kazan that opened on Wednesday at City Center in a Manhattan Theater Club production, the summer nuptials of the daughter of an artsy clan in New England brings about a painful family reckoning with the impact of a tragedy from a dozen years before. Amy Irving plays Maggie, the mother of the bride, who is seen greedily opening her soon-to-be-wedded daughter's gifts as the play begins, a neon-bright indicator of her narcissism if ever there was one. Maggie airily insists that she's just trying to be helpful, but it is soon clear that she is the kind of mom who thinks being helpful extends to organizing every facet of the family's social and emotional lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stage directions, those humble, practical and occasionally ignored players in the art of dramatic composition, are the stars of the show at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, where the New York Neo-Futurists are presenting a handful of early Eugene O'Neill plays, shorn of all dialogue. ''The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill Volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays'' sounds like the title of an exceptionally dreary doctoral thesis, but the show, adapted and directed by Christopher Loar, is something far more enjoyable, an impish illustration of how lively entertainment can be created from theatrical spare parts. Elevator Repair Service has won acclaim with its elaborate staged readings of classic works of literature, but the Neo-Futurists, best known for the 30-plays-in-60-minutes whirlwind ''Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,'' have set themselves a more challenging task in removing the dramatic heart and soul of a play's text, leaving only the indications of action to hold the stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Last seen in sober work attire, with his nose buried in a book for about six hours, the protean actor Scott Shepherd appears in far more garish guises in the Wooster Group's restless but surprisingly reverent production of ''Vieux Carre,'' a little-seen Tennessee Williams play in which the writer exhumes a macabre assortment of lonely ghosts from his youthful, desperate days in New Orleans in the late 1930s. Mr. Shepherd, who played the narrator Nick Carraway in ''Gatz,'' the fall season's acclaimed word-by-word enactment of ''The Great Gatsby,'' enters the darkened playing space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in what might be called a state of faux tumescence. You hardly notice the dilapidated kimono robe or the frazzled gray fright wig that almost obscures the actor's pale, angular features, for strapped to Mr. Shepherd's waist is a rubber phallus that enters the room before he does. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]