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TheaterMarch 2009 Tough love by Brooke Allen On Becky Shaw at the Second Stage, The American Plan at the Manhattan Theater Club, and Sleepwalk With Me at the Bleecker Street Theater. Finally, finally! A really good new play that I can recommend without reservation. It has been such a long dry spell that I had begun to despair of the whole season, both on- and off-Broadway, until seeing Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw at the Second Stage. The play is full of surprises, both aesthetic and thematic, and Gionfriddo produces the kind of sharp, high-speed, and high-potency dialogue that so many playwrights aspire to and so few achieve. She writes in a peculiarly masculine style, more akin to Mamet than to any other contemporary author I can think of (though her work is in no way imitative of his). Consulting the program at intermission, I was actually shocked to discover that this rather hard play, as bracing as a cold wind, which resolutely works against the grain of contemporary ideals of sensitivity, had been written by a woman. The action begins a few months after the death of the b ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 March 2009, on page 35 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Tough-love-4033
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by Brooke Allen On Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre, The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, 33 Variations at Eugene O'Neill Theater, and the closing of Forbidden Broadway. On Jude Law in Hamlet, the Atlantic Theater Company's Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, Collaborative Stages's House of Yes, and The Retributionists by Daniel Goldfarb. On After Luke & When I Was God at the Irish Repertory Theater, New York, A Lifetime of Burning at e59e, New York & The Bacchae in Central Park. On A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound and The Europeans at Atlantic Stage 2.  The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices 
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