“Patriots,” a gripping, juicy drama replete with a terrifying performance from Will Keen as a Richard III-like you-know-who, offers up a potted history of Russia from the 1990s, the era of bumbling Boris Yeltsin, to the present. Its central dramatic question? How did Putin happen?
Morgan’s Wikipedia-esque play does its best to track the perilous tango between oligarchy and politics, but it’s built around the assumption that it’s amusing and ironic that one man who created a monster got chewed up and spit out by it, and the rest of us have to pay.
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Pope/Bettany Elevate ‘The Collaboration’ Into Art Worth Contemplating
One of them paved a path of his own ascending to artistic godhood by glorifying the mundane; the other painted SAMO (meaning the Same Old Sh*t) criticizing the very idea of repetition. One of them broke down the wall between art and business; for the other, walls didn’t mean a thing. One saw beauty, immortality, […]
Read MoreComplex Men and Caricatures of Women Are Caught ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’
Walter “Pops” Washington, as he self-describes in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer-winning play Between Riverside and Crazy, is “a flesh and blood, pee standing up, registered Republican.” He is also a litigious former cop caught within the crossroads of bureaucracy, racism, life as a widower, and a fast-gentrifying Riverside Drive. He also happens to be Black. […]
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