(Charles Isherwood’s article appeared in The New York Times, 1/30.)

Total fearlessness is not a requirement for embarking on an acting career. But it is definitely a necessity for essaying the role of the dying gorgon Flora Goforth in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” a curious, rather curdled 1963 play by Tennessee Williams.

In Olympia Dukakis, the star of the new Off Broadway revival directed by Michael Wilson at the Laura Pels Theater, the Roundabout Theater Company has found an actress with the fortitude to risk ridicule in this fitfully moving, patchily eloquent but often preposterous drama about the loneliness and fear that can attend our going forth into the great unknown. Fortunately, Ms. Dukakis also possesses the talent to make the effort worthwhile.

via theater.nytimes.com

(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 1/27.)

There is a moment in this extraordinary, exhilarating circus-theatre piece, from Mathurin Bolze and Compagnie MPTA, when you can't help thinking of the Titanic and the story of the band playing on as the ship went down. The performers, who are more like athletes, seem to always play on: they are restless creatures of astonishing beauty, stranded on what may be a raft, a platform, or planet Earth itself. We watch as they are tossed upon the sea of life, which constantly threatens to destroy them. They willingly walk the plank as if endlessly testing themselves, they become human metronomes caught between planks, and they are transformed into ghostly shadows spinning through time and space.

via www.guardian.co.uk

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(Hedy Weiss’s article appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1/26.)

It begins with one of those harrowing car rides through a war zone — the kind where sniper fire can come from any angle, a land mine might be set off at any point, and for varying reasons, each occupant of the vehicle might be prime prey for “the rebels,” or “government forces,” or whoever is carrying an automatic weapon.

via www.suntimes.com