Tag: Playwrights Horizons
Review | The [curious case of the] Watson Intelligence by Madeleine George | Directed by Leigh Silverman | Playwrights Horizons
In Off-Broadway Theater
Reference to Sherlock Holmes, computers, time travel and mysterious goings-on — it all sounds wild and wacky, but it's pretentious and not clever.
The play weaves in and out about several Watsons, Sherlock Holmes' sidekick, Dr. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's assistant, Thomas Watson, who, in a nearby room, received Bell's first telephone call, IBM's natural-language-processing supercomputer, Watson (named after the founder of IBM), and the "real" contemporary man in the play, a computer repairer Watson who's just a nice guy.
Review | Completeness by Itamar Moses | Directed by Pam MacKinnon | Playwrights Horizons
Itamar Moses catches today's lingo like butterflies. Completeness is about young people, in the Computer Science and Biology Departments of a university, talking about love, molecular biology and computer science, while going through a variety of partners. It's good to have a play about people who are intelligent and care about their work.
Elliot is a Computer Science Assistant Professor (or thereabouts) who — beyond his sleepy-eyed cool — is dedicated to solving THE problem in Computer Science, "The Salesman's Problem" — and if you see the play, he will tell you all about its complexities. He's so articulate you feel he knows everything, except how to resolve the conflict between his anxiety about commitment (described in a hilariously hyperbolic monolog that's a high point of the play) and a yearning to settle in with "the one" or "love" or whatever.
Review | Go Back To Where You Are by David Greenspan | Directed by Leigh Silverman | Playwrights Horizons | Peter Jay Sharp Theater
… transformations …
The setting, the deck of Claire's beach house around Montauk, on the East End of Long Island, is delightful and the play is pleasant in a summery way well into it, with sun shining on the deck, the ocean near by, and a touch of the magic of time travel. Lunch is being prepared, conversations swirl, tensions emerge among the characters to keep things interesting. Claire's a successful actress while her friend and fellow actress, Charlotte, has to scramble for parts. Tom's a successful producer, on hand because he's working with Claire on her next play, but he and his partner Malcolm are at odds because of Tom's compulsive promiscuity.