Author Archives

University administrator and teacher by day, theater and arts critic by night.

DF Reviews The Whale (Theatre Exile, February 2015)

It hit me the minute the curtain went up on The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter’s marvelous, heartbreaking play, in an exceptionally fine […]

“Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!,” Tennessee Williams famously wrote. Here, though, He doesn’t show up till 9:15. Roughly 70 minutes […]

David Leddy’s Long Live the Little Knife, a 2013 Edinburgh Fringe hit now receiving a stylish production at Inis Nua, strikes me […]

“Can we have an honest conversation about race?” It’s a question I hear with some regularity in my day job in university […]

Encores Musicals in Concert opened their current season – the 22nd, if I’m counting correctly – with exactly the kind of show […]

In Halley Feiffer’s I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, two damaged egos go at it, though (initially, at least) it’s hardly […]

The great thing about Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s slender but effective drama about child abuse in the church, is that our sympathies […]

I went to Birdman knowing very little – that it’s about an actor trying to reinvent himself by doing a Broadway play, and […]

A sad truth that’s dawned on me as I’ve gotten older: We may all be, as our doting mothers told us, “unique” […]

It’s been a strong Philadelphia theatre season so far, and the Winter/Spring has quite a few more promising events. I’ve compiled the […]