Toby Zinman has been reviewing theater for The Inquirer since January 2006; she's the Philadelpha reviewer for Variety and a frequent contributor to American Theatre magazine.
Her “day job” is professor of English at the University of the Arts, where she was awarded the prize for distinguished teaching. As an academic, she has published widely and lectured internationally on contemporary American drama.
A Fulbright professor in theater at Tel Aviv University, she also has received five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been invited to be a visiting lecturer in China. Her third book, on Edward Albee’s plays, is set for 2008 publication by the University of Michigan Press.
Her third career, as an adventure travel writer, has taken her all over the world.
Nikolai Gogol, the 19th-century Russian writer with a strong sense of the ridiculopathy of life - after all, he wrote a story about a nose - would seem to be a perfect fit for the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, a theater company specializing in Theater of the Absurd, though Gogol's play Marriage (an utterly improbably occurrence in two acts) isn't really absurdist drama - it's a farce, complete with loud voices, many doors, (and a significant window).
Little Gem, Inis Nua Company's production of a new play by Elaine Murphy, is full of charm and sentiment and monologues and accents and working-class women who keep on keeping on. In other words, it's an Irish play.
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Story of the man who brought Jackie Robinson to the bigs
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Back in the day, when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn and baseball was an all-white game, Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson and changed American sports forever. That story - one that would seem a good idea for Black History Month - is the basis of Branch, now at Society Hill Playhouse. The show began with a startling and weirdly manipulative moment: The national anthem was played on a scratchy record, and everyone in the audience stood up.
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'Clybourne Park': Guilt and hypocrisy in a racially changing neighborhood
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In Lorraine Hansberry's classic American play A Raisin in the Sun, Karl Linder, representative of a committee that wants to keep his white neighborhood white, visits the black Younger family.
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A squeaky door, a scream . . . it's 'The Mousetrap'
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That creaky sound you hear is not just a door ominously opening; it's also the plot of the legendary Agatha Christie mystery The Mousetrap at the Walnut Street Theatre. The play has been running for an astonishing 60 years - it's the world's longest-running play, and for the first time its producers are permitting productions outside London.
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Riveting - even the Shona
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PRINCETON - A contempt-filled word: Bafu means traitor in Shona, the indigenous language in the African country that would become Zimbabwe, and The Convert is about betrayal. This world premiere at the McCarter Theatre Center, written by Danai Gurira and directed by Emily Mann, boasts a cast that is beyond outstanding. The performances are so riveting that the play's three hours fly by.
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'Joe Turner's Come and Gone': A tale of searching, tinged with mysticism
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Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a big, strong, juicy play, and Plays & Players' production is just as big, strong, and juicy. Representing the second decade in August Wilson's "Century Cycle," Joe Turner takes place a hundred years ago in 1911, a suitable choice for Plays & Players Theater's 100th anniversary. While the building may be old, the company is new; it's led by Daniel Student, who is rapidly proving himself a young director of range and vision.
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Finally, a very fine 'Proof'
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David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof has found a perfect venue in the intimate Independence Studio on 3 at the Walnut Street Theatre. This luminous production, directed by Kate Galvin, invites you onto the porch and into the lives of four interesting people.
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'In the Footprint': Unfocused tale of a real estate grab
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If there's anything New Yorkers like to talk about more than restaurants, it's real estate. In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards, a show performed by the Civilians at the Annenberg Center, is a docudrama about the unpromising topic of eminent domain - the complex real estate legality that can crush an individual homeowner in the jaws of corporate takeover.
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Play based on 'Gatsby' is anything but great
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The emperor walked beneath the beautiful canopy in the procession, and all the people in the street said, "Goodness, the emperor's new clothes are incomparable! What a beautiful jacket! What a perfect fit!" No one wanted it to be noticed that he could see nothing, for then it would be said that he was unfit for his position or that he was stupid. "But he doesn't have anything on!" said a small child.
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Dated Italian political farce doesn't resurrect well at all
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How do you say dated and boring in Italian? Oooh, wait, wait, I know, I know: Dario Fo. Curio Theatre is giving the Italian farce-meister a revival with its production of Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, only to prove that this highly political comedy is thoroughly mired in postwar European issues and thus irrelevant to contemporary American audiences and, as a consequence, is desperately unfunny.
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Durang's 'Torture,' at advanced age of 2
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Christopher Durang, America's self-appointed satirist, the theater's oldest living teenager, wrote New City Stage's current show, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them two years ago. An assault on the "war on terror," this is the perfect demonstration of how short the shelf life of political humor is. On his worst day, Stephen Colbert wouldn't foist off stuff this stale on us.
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