Amelia Merrill

Feb 27, 2025 | newyorktheatreguide.com | Amelia Merrill

Rajiv Joseph’s Dakar 2000, produced by Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center, is a tad weightier than King James, his last MTC two-hander. While the latter involves friends beefing over basketball, Dakar 2000 is loosely based on the playwright’s time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal; he was stationed there when, across the continent, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Feb 25, 2025 | newyorktheatreguide.com | Amelia Merrill

No one understood the link between manifest destiny and masculinity quite like Sam Shepard. The late playwright knew that an American man’s potential lay in the open prairie of the Midwest, waiting to sprout like wheat, and that tests of his strength came in the harshness of the unconquered desert. Whether Shepard’s work champions these ruffian views or skewers them mercilessly is the question that keeps his characters’ hearts beating years later.

Nov 20, 2024 | newyorktheatreguide.com | Amelia Merrill

It’s telling that the most cohesive musical moment of Babe, Jessica Goldberg’s new play with The New Group, doesn’t feature the original music by BETTY or the performances of fictional punk princess Kat Wonder (Gracie McGraw). Nor does it showcase an artist plucked from obscurity by Gus (Arliss Howard), a prickly yet successful record producer who just got out of sensitivity training but still rubs new hire Katherine (also McGraw) the wrong way.

Nov 15, 2024 | newyorktheatreguide.com | Amelia Merrill

In a time of turbulence and political upheaval, Pony Cam, an Australian theatre collective now performing at St. Ann’s Warehouse, knows you still have to do your laundry. Whatever else is going on in the world, your taxes, your grocery list, your friend’s birthday party, and the daunting weight of your career obligations will still be there. Pony Cam is intimate with this balancing act of adult life; their show Burnout Paradise honors the act of running out of time to get everything done.

Nov 12, 2024 | americantheatre.org | Amelia Merrill

Scenic design is not just visual but tactile, and written descriptions are no match for photo or video documentation. Accordingly, books about design sometimes lack the energy that sparks from seeing the art itself. Two new books on designers and production workers come to life not only through photography, but because they put artists and laborers at the forefront of the conversation.