Amelia Merrill

It’s a common trope: Hollywood is where playwrights go to make a living. Theatre is where a writer can create a passion project, but TV is where a writer can make bank. Many playwrights thus join not only the Dramatists Guild for their theatre contracts, but also the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which has been on strike since May 2.

There is a debate in King James, the play by Rajiv Joseph now running with Manhattan Theatre Club, over whether the greatest basketball player of all time is LeBron James, to whom the play pays tribute, or Michael Jordan. The play’s two characters argue in jest about which player leaves a bigger mark: Jordan did this, but James did that, a...

The Broadway production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, now running at the James Earl Jones Theatre, feels almost antithetical to the play’s debates about the morality and function of art: Two TV and movie stars (Oscar Isaac in the title role and Rachel Brosnahan as his wife, Iris) make it a hot ticket, while producers transf...

There are neon marquee lights from days of old. There are bustling dancers showing off their prowess as they rush to work and back home. There are even a few classics from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s heyday. Unfortunately for New York, New York, now running on Broadway at the St. James Theatre, there isn’t much else.
Loosely based on Martin Scor...

The star of Douglas Wright’s play Good Night, Oscar, now running on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, is Sean Hayes, who receives above-the-title billing and will no doubt receive numerous accolades. But the second star is Jacqueline E. Lawton, the production’s dramaturg. Lawton (along with dramaturg Neena Arndt of the Goodman Theatre,...

“On the third day of Thanksgiving, the Natives gave to me four bows and arrows, three Native headdresses […] and a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch.” This parody song begins The Thanksgiving Play, playwright Larissa FastHorse’s Broadway debut — the first ever for a Native American woman — at Second Stage's Hayes Theater. The song, which FastH...

Before the curtain rises on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella, a recognizable tune floats through the theatre: “In My Own Little Corner,” Cinderella’s wishful thinking classic from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical. Webber uses the song as a leitmotif throughout his adaptation, setting the notes to his protagonist’s confession that she is “...

Many Eric Bogosian titles feel tailored to 2023 audiences. Talk Radio examines the creation of an entertainment persona, parasocial relationships, and far-right extremist violence. subUrbia discusses the timeless dilemma of growing up, getting out, and getting your life together. But Bogosian’s Drinking in America, now at the Minetta Lane Theat...

The passenger next to you on a long train ride could be the bane of your existence — or they could be your soulmate. When that trip is 36 hours long, it’s impossible not to imagine both. Such is the conceit of Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight, now playing at Lincoln Center Theater.
The play begins with Jane (Camila Canó-Flaviá) and T.J. ...

Playwright Deepa Purohit has had an unconventional career: Before co-founding a theatre company, she taught in public schools, opened a consulting business, and got a master's in public health from Columbia. These experiences gave her the insight to pen Elyria, a tale of the Gujarati diaspora in 1982 Ohio, now playing at Atlantic Theater ...

Odysseus, the tortured hero of Homer’s Odyssey, spends 10 years lost at sea en route home to Ithaca. Ulysses (Sean Boyce Johnson), a Black American soldier deployed to Afghanistan, travels decades through his own bloodstream to reach his despondent wife and son, searching sea, river, and Harlem for the ancestor who will “baptize you of the blo...

When Marvin Samel began telling his father’s life story, he didn’t think he would ever make a film. He had never sold a screenplay or even been on a film set. He was closer to Hollywood, Florida than Los Angeles, and his time was divided between caring for his ailing mother and his twin daughters. But the story of his father, Mordecai, a Holocaust survivor whose stubbornness and frugality became a frequent source of neighborhood hilarity, was begging to be told. Samel made people laugh when h...

Weeks after Cleveland Play House (CPH) announced it was canceling the February world premiere of I’m Back Now: Returning to Cleveland, playwright Charly Evon Simpson issued a statement on Feb. 8 saying that she in fact had pulled the rights to her play, in tandem with director Stori Ayers, who resigned in protest over the way the theatre handled a case of sexual assault. In a statement on Twitter, Simpson wrote, “I said NO to having my play done at Cleveland Play House…I said NO to my play be...

“A Radiant Girl,” the 2021 film from Jewish actor and director Sandrine Kiberlain now receiving a wide release, is the rare film to trust the intelligence of its audience. It trusts that we can understand the environment of protagonist Irène (Rebecca Marder), a Jewish teenager fixated on her audition for a performing arts conservatory in Paris in the summer of 1942. It trusts that we can balance the events of the film with the knowledge of what will happen to Irène, her family and all of the ...

The Jewish people have long been referred to as the “people of the book.” The Wanderers, Anna Ziegler’s much-delayed Roundabout Theatre Company production, lets this nickname define its characters and setting. Pious Esther, for one, sneaks books from the local library, letting the tales of Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women shape her view of a l...