Review

ANNULLA

After college, writer-director Emily Mann backpacked through her European heritage to the Polish village of her maternal grandmother, in an attempt to get oral histories of her family's holocaust experience. Unable to connect with her grandmother in the old woman's fractured Polish, Yiddish, and English, Mann was directed ...

MOTHER COURAGE

The prickly political satires of German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) nowadays seem like tough nuts to crack. When productions capture the key stylistic aspects of Brecht's unique Epic Theatre movement, the result can be vibrant theatre. Yet the declamatory polemic-style monologues, extremely presentational staging techniques, and elicitation of ...

ANNA IN THE TROPICS

The lyrical language of Nilo Cruz's 2003 Pulitzer Prize–winning play brings with it the feeling of wild, windswept hillsides or churning ocean waves breaking madly on the beach; it is altogether beautiful, powerful, and breathtaking. More's the pity, then, that the Los Angeles premiere stumbles and falls ...

AN INVISIBLE MAN

A funny thing happened to R. Christofer Sands on the way to puberty. His boy-soprano voice never deepened. It's tough for a man to forge a career as an actor/ singer when he has a freak, four-and-a-half-octave voice that enables him to sing like a woman. "Being a countertenor ...

DESTROY SHE SAID

In Marguerite Duras' intensely hard-to-penetrate drama, Stein (Walter Murray) and Thor (Ryan Higgins) are two Jewish gentlemen staying at an exclusive spa that caters to folks suffering from nervous exhaustion. Stein and Thor are not suffering from such a condition themselves—at least, not at the play's start—but ...

Aphrodisiac

Presented by 13P at P.S. 122, 150 First Ave., NYC, Jan. 9-30.

Communion

Presented by Origin Theatre Company at the Phil Bosakowski Theatre, 354 W. 45 St., NYC, Jan. 10-23.

LYSISTRATA, D.C.

In 2003, as a form of protest against the American-led military action in Iraq, the anti-war comedy Lysistrata, written in 411 B.C. by Aristophanes, was performed or publicly read by more than 1,000 groups in nearly 60 countries. One participant in the Lysistrata Project was Joanna Bloem, who ...

Daniel Léveillé Danse: The Modesty of Icebergs

Presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 E. 10 St., NYC, Jan. 6-9.

Opening This Week: ETHEL MERMAN'S BROADWAY

My earliest recollection of the late showbiz legend Ethel Merman dates back to an early-1960s episode of The Lucy Show, in which zany Lucy Carmichael (Lucille Ball) meets the Merm and assumes that she is an impostor. When the Broadway superstar belts out one of her famous foghorn crescendos, Lucy ...