David Cromer

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The Counter

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The Counter

Director David Cromer has the ability to conjure expansive worlds from small, banal settings: For Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter, the set (designed with remarkable detail by Walt Spangler) occupies only a part of the space available on the stage of Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. As he did with A Case for the Existence of God at Signature Theatre, Cromer encloses the characters in order to open them up. Of course, in order to perform this low-key magic, there must be sharply drawn, deeply human characters to work with.

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Dead Outlaw

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Dead Outlaw

The afterlife of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was as brilliant as his failed life of train and bank robbery was bleak. In the new musical Dead Outlaw, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna (music and lyrics), and Itamar Moses (book) team up with director David Cromer to tell the true story of a turn-of-the-century outlaw who became a famous carnival attraction after his untimely death.

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The Animal Kingdom

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The Animal Kingdom

There are few theatrical experiences more thrilling than witnessing a new play catch fire and mesmerize an audience.  That experience is now to be had at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, where British playwright Ruby Thomas’s airtight 80-minute drama, The Animal Kingdom, is making its U.S. premiere.  Tautly directed by Jack Serio, it’s a show that is emotionally gripping and ultimately redemptive.

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A Case for the Existence of God

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A Case for the Existence of God

Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.

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Prayer for the French Republic

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Prayer for the French Republic

Issues of Jewish identity, religion, heritage and oppression are given a fresh spin in Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, a work of considerable length and intellectual heft. Harmon has set his drama in France, America’s oldest ally, which shares its values. Although it is a country closer geographically and emotionally to the harrowing experience inflicted on Jews by World War II and the Holocaust, it stands in for the United States as well. Incidents of anti-Semitism have increased in both countries in the last decade.

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The Treasurer

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The Treasurer

“Regarding suicide I just don’t have sad emotions,” says Jacob, the occasional narrator of The Treasurer, Max Posner’s deeply felt, sharply observed play about dementia and care-giving. Jacob (a no-nonsense, resentful Peter Friedman) is the hard-as-nails son who, along with Allen and Jeremy, the more accommodating brothers, must take care of his widowed mother, Ida (Deanna Dunagin, who charts a painfully realistic physical and mental decline). By the play’s end, Jacob is as sad as can be.

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