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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Small is (more) beautiful

June 28, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s drama column, I review a Massachusetts production, Shakespeare & Company’s revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. Here’s an excerpt.

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The belated coming of Kenneth Lonergan to Broadway is one of the best things to happen to theater in America in the past decade. For even though Mr. Lonergan is the finest American playwright of his generation, his work has never been as widely known—or frequently staged—as it should be. As a result, the revivals of “This Is Our Youth” (1996), “Lobby Hero” (2002) and “The Waverly Gallery” (1999) that came to Broadway in 2014, 2018 and last fall have brought him to the attention of theatergoers who were hitherto unfamiliar with his subtle, richly wrought studies of messy lives and moral choices. That said, it’s also true that Mr. Lonergan’s plays were all originally written for performance in off-Broadway theaters, and while they can be effectively mounted in larger houses, as Lila Neugebauer proved with “The Waverly Gallery,” they work best when seen in more intimate spaces.

Witness Shakespeare & Company’s exceptional new revival of “The Waverly Gallery,” which is being performed in that company’s 200-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre in a production staged by Tina Packer, the company’s founder, and starring Annette Miller in the role that won Elaine May a well-deserved Tony two weeks ago. Like Ms. May, Ms. Miller is an octogenarian at the peak of her powers…

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Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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