Neil LaBute has spent the majority of his career deconstructing the societal taboos that most people mindlessly adopt with nary a thought to their validity. With All the Ways to Say I Love You – the first play of MCC Theater’s 30^th anniversary season, of which Mr. LaBute is the playwright-in-residence – he sets his sights on exploring the morality of the hot-button issue of teachers forging “inappropriate” relationships with their underage students. Those textual air quotes are basically the crux of the play: even though almost everyone would immediately write-off such a relationship as immoral and thus inappropriate, this one-woman show strives to understand the psychology that drove the female teacher at its center to engage in such near-universally agreed upon immorality. This understanding will hopefully elicit empathy for a visibly tortured soul whose perspective they never even considered, which has long been one of the foundational goals of drama since its origins in Greek tragedy.

Continue reading “ALL THE WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU: Please, Sir, I Want Some More” →

I know that I’m excessively late to this party, but holy cow I’d be surprised if I see five better plays this season than Small Mouth Sounds. It’s a prime example of what happens when you actually present the work of young, diverse voices – in this case, two women: playwright Bess Wohl and director Rachel Chavkin. Hopefully this boosts the careers of these two phenomenal talents in the same way that Circle Mirror Transformation enhanced the profiles of Annie Baker and Sam Gold (pretty lofty company!). If you can see it by Sunday, DO SO. If you can’t, I’m sure that it will – as it should – be produced in so many regional theatres all across the country in the near future. If it comes to your city, do yourself a favor and purchase a ticket – very few other plays in recent memory so encapsulate the special human alchemy of live theatre.