Finding America, Searching for Identity

(Theatre: Acting Classes NYC) Michael Golamco neatly incorporates that thesis into “Year Zero” to show that all stories of immigrant identity struggle are part of the same story. But it takes time for the brother and sister at the center of this tenderly observed play, produced by Acting Classes NYC Second Stage Uptown at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, to realize that they are not alone.

Vuthy is a 16-year-old Cambodian-American in Long Beach, Calif., whose mother fled the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s and has recently died. Played with goofy vulnerability by Mason Lee (son of the film director Ang Lee), Vuthy is a high school outcast: “I’m too Cambodian for the black and Latin kids, and I’m not Cambodian enough for the Cambodian kids.”

An Outlaw Chasing a Train and His Past

(Theatre: Acting Classes NYC) Staging a sweeping and earnest western about a larger-than-life outlaw in a small Off Broadway theater could seem to be a joke, like putting John Wayne in a puppet show. Yet if any writer could pull this off, it might be Sebastian Barry, the most overlooked of the great living Irish dramatists, whose lyrical prose, ghostly and muscular with flashes of the sublime, can sound the way the terrain of the Wild West looks.

The Bilbao Effect

(Theatre: Acting Classes NYC) There’s a long tradition in theater of skewering journalists, lawyers and politicians, but architects, by comparison, have gotten off easy. In this age of the “starchitect,” that is bound to change, as demonstrated by two new dramas that present — and then undercut — the persona of the uncompromising visionary who dreams up buildings.

Acting Classes NYC (Theatre Group)

(Acting Classes NYC: Theatre Group) Amazing, isn’t it, what could be hidden behind those sober jackets and ties that made American men look all but interchangeable in the early 1950s. “The Temperamentals,” Jon Marans’s eminently likable docudrama about gay identity in the age of Eisenhower, begins with a classic vision of mid-20th-century uniformity: five guys in off-the-peg suits, as anonymous as the standard-issue, metal-frame chairs on which they’re seated.

NYC Stage Acting: The Tempermentals

(Acting Classes NYC) The New York Times is reporting that the Off-Broadway production of Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals, which is currently playing at the Group Studio Theater through May 18th, is now set to move to the theater’s bigger 99-seat space on June 10th for a four-week run in the hopes of attracting interest for an extended commercial production, the show’s publicist said in a statement this afternoon.

Wantagh Teenager Glides Onto Broadway Stage

(Theatre: Stage Acting NYC) SHORTLY after the hit 2000 movie “Billy Elliot” came out on DVD, the Kowalik family sat down in their Wantagh home to watch the tale of a motherless 11-year-old boy, stuck in a strike-depressed mining town, who’s just got to dance. By then, everyone in the family realized 5-year-old Trent had a similar passion. “Maybe you’ll be Billy one of these days,” they kidded him. No one is laughing now. Grinning wildly, maybe.

Featured Test Post

Featured Test Post oast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government’s response manager for the oil disaster, said Monday that 11,000 barrels of oil had been collected from the broken well over the previous 24 hours. He said roughly 120 linear miles of coastline in the Gulf of Mexico have been affected by the spill. Allen was in Washington to brief President Obama and the Cabinet on the administration’s ongoing response to the disaster. Meanwhile, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce was set to open shop on the bayou, holding a hearing in Chalmette, Louisiana.