No, I’m not here, nor am I blogging from my secret hideaway. I wrote this posting on Wednesday and stowed it with Our Girl for your Friday-morning delectation.
As usual, I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, this time with reviews of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, Mark Medoff’s Prymate, and Neil LaBute’s The Distance from Here.
Frozen is brilliant:
Here’s a phrase that makes my blood run cold: “That play deals with a lot of really good issues.” I myself prefer plays that deal with life, not issues, but the two have been known to overlap on occasion, and it’s not unheard of for a really good playwright to use a “really good issue” as the pretext for a voyage into the unchartable labyrinth of human motivation. More often, what you get is a pulpit-pounding sermon with a politically correct moral, but Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen,” which transferred to Circle in the Square this week after a successful Off-Broadway run, is the polar opposite, an issue-driven play that grinds no axes. It is superior in every way-script, performances, staging, set. If I had tonight off, I’d go see it again….
Prymate is awful:
Esther (Phyllis Frelich), a deaf-mute anthropologist, steals Graham (Andr