Catherine Sawoski

Selected Works

• Killing the Womanly Parts: NAATCO's Gender-Bending “Cymbeline” In the National Asian American Theater Company’s Cymbeline, every rageful man is played by a woman.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• To The Bone: Grave Robbing Black Bodies in Nia Akilah Robinson’s The Great Privation Near the end of Nia Akilah Robinson’s play The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar), Charity holds her ancestor’s skull in her hands. Standing in a shallow grave, she places him back into the casket he was stolen from almost two centuries before. She does not feel any better.
  The Brooklyn Rail
• Ballet, Bushwick, and a Techno Party “The only way to be established is to establish yourself.” STAMINA at Project III takes doing-it-yourself to the next level.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• To Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: Book Review, "Enter Ghost" Isabella Hammad’s 2023 novel chronicles the resistance of a production of Hamlet staged in the West Bank.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• Monstrosity as Symptom in Celine Song’s “Family” In a site-specific work by the Past Lives creator, surrealism and incest are the only options.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• In “Cellino v. Barnes” Inside Knowledge is Too Essential What happens when you have nothing but inside jokes to keep a show afloat? The caricatures, with nothing to make them interesting, fall to billboard levels of flat.
  Culturebot
• Pure Vinegar in "Honeyland" Between the frustratingly empty characters and superficial issues, there just isn’t much to say about this musical recounting 1960s America.
  Culturebot
• When It Rains, It Pours: Queer Hilarity in “Vile Isle” Justin Halle and Spencer Whale’s new play at The Tank follows a group of gay men at the end of the world.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• Asking More from Matthew Freeman’s “The Ask” Matthew Freeman, like most New York City creatives, has a day job. The award-winning playwright, who premiered his latest play, The Ask, in early September, spends his time out of the theater as a giving director at the ACLU. For the past thirteen years, he has asked rich, liberal donors for vast sums of money, from 9-5, and spent nights working on drafts of scripts. At long last, he’s decided to combine the two.
  Culturebot
• Father/Parent, Mother/Father: Imaging the Possibility of Both in Kelindah Bee Schuster’s “seapony” The audience sits on sand while an artist simulates giving birth.
  Culturebot
• Dialogue vs Diagnosis in Matthew Gasda’s “Morning Journal” The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, based out of a loft in Greenpoint, is known for shows that tread the line of intellectualism and indulgence.
  Culturebot
• It’s Nice to See You: An Empathetic Theatrical Experience for One You – just you – walk into an empty space. The only thing visible is a note with a phone number on it, and when the voice on the other line picks up, it asks you to acknowledge that you are completely alone.
  Culturebot
• Hamlet in the Park This play, as you may have learned in high school English, is about (among other things) the gap between what people seem to be and what they are underneath.
  The Drift
• Looking Through the Window with Mur Mur shows up at the Murray Hill coffee shop in an outfit streaked with multicolored paint and a gift for me still drying in their hand.
  Culturebot
• Annie Baker’s Language of Silence in Film Debut ‘Janet Planet' Annie Baker is a writer of silences.
  FF2 Media
• Façades and Filmmaking in ‘Family Portrait’ from Lucy Kerr It is hard to believe the first ten minutes of the drama film Family Portrait are choreographed.
  FF2 Media
• Wooster Group’s Symphony of Rats: Delirious, Surreal, and Synthesized The president of the United States sits in a wheelchair commode, speaking in a synthesized voice.
  Culturebot
• Circling the Creator in “Third Law” The audience, a group of ten people padding along in their socks, line up silently along the back wall. The glowing outline of a circle appears on the floor. Someone is brave enough to step in.
  Culturebot
• In Dominique Morisseau’s ‘Sunset Baby’ We Feel Rather than Know' When Socrates banished theater from the Republic, it was because of its ability to fool. Weak minds, Plato wrote, would be so convinced by what they saw they would lose all ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, between poet and pretender. Dialogue, of course, was the biggest offender – how could anyone pretend to inhabit the mind of someone else?
  FF2 Media