Anne Sherber

Stories from Anne Sherber

Fifty years later, 'Raisin' still reverberates
Anne Sherber
Sunday, April 17, 2011

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, currently showing through May 1st at New Brunswick's Crossroads Theatre Company, is at once a snapshot of a significant moment in American history and a slice of the everyday working-class life of the Younger clan, a family living in a run-down tenement in Chicago in the early 1950s.

Crossroads still carrying the torch for Lady Day
Anne Sherber
Monday, February 21, 2011

 

We just can’t resist a tragic hero.

Of course, we love the rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, anyone-can-be-president fables. Those stories are a part of our collective DNA. But we are also fascinated by and drawn to the flip side; we are riveted by the stories of sympathetic characters who might have had it all, but for demons that prove too formidable.

No, you can't go home again . . . . and are you sure you wanted to?
Anne Sherber
Saturday, February 12, 2011

Set at the end of World War II, and written in 1964 at the beginning of a sea change in Americans’ view of themselves and the world, “The Subject Was Roses” takes a scalpel to one family’s precarious calm, revealing the simmering dysfunction beneath.

Frank Gilroy’s play is receiving a new production at George Street Playhouse, starring Stephanie Zimbalist, Lee Sellars and Chris Wendelken.

Can't tell the players without a program
Anne Sherber
Monday, September 27, 2010

Before the curtain even goes up on 'Character Assassins,' a new play by Charlie Schulman receiving its world premiere at New Jersey Repertory Company, the theater company’s (actual, non-actor) producer gives a little promotional spiel -- the fire exits, the cell phones, a strobe light warning.

Stop, children . . . What's that sound?
Anne Sherber
Monday, April 26, 2010

When it comes to conspiracy theories, most people land somewhere between the extremes. Perhaps they believe that Oswald acted alone, but the Apollo space landing was a hoax. Or they implicate the CIA in killing Martin Luther King, but accept Princess Diana’s death as a tragic accident.

Steppenwolf Theatre goes slummin' in Princeton
Anne Sherber
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s current revival of David Mamet’s 1975 play American Buffalo, in residence at Princeton’s McCarter Theater until March 28, is, at once, claustrophobic and explosive, both testosterone-soaked and, surprisingly, deeply sentimental. Mamet, whose plays often pick at scabs on the American psyche, explores the shifting and unsteady sand that lies beneath the relationships between three low-life grifters as they try to plan a robbery.

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