Catherine Sawoski

Selected Works

• At Target Margin, This Is Real Explodes, and Strips Down, Genet Target Margin Theater’s This Is Real counts among its influences the Declaration of Independence, “Home on the Range,” the Aeneid, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, and the writings of Jean Genet.
  The Brooklyn Rail
• Review: Public Charge at the Public Theater Can diplomacy become the stuff of theater? Catherine Sawoski reviews a new play by, and about, a former US ambassador.
  Exeunt NYC
• Review: The Book of I by David Greig In the first chapter of David Greig’s The Book of I, a band of Vikings—Buttercock, Gore Dog, Puffin Face, Fuck-a-Whale, among others—descend upon a Scottish isle with comic brutality.
  The Harvard Review
• What Do Indie Bookstores and Off-Broadway Theater Have in Common? As cozy bookstore narratives gain popularity, new plays explore the romantic allure and cultural fascination with life among the stacks, including the site-specific production Edward, set in shops around New York City.
  The Hat
• A Vibrant Whole: Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein's Friday Night Rat Catchers Works of experimental performance often keep the audience at a distance, continuously getting more abstract, almost as if to challenge the viewer to find any sense of meaning. In this avant garde work, however, the audience is in on the joke.
  Culturebot
• Review: The Bookstore at 59E59 A play about a bookstore that never comes to life off the page.
  Exeunt Magazine
• Review: Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette We’re in the era of the rediscovered classic. Books like John Williams’s Stoner, left to collect dust for decades, have been pulled out of archives and attics and reprinted to wild success. Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying, originally published in 1953, hopes to place itself in this genre.
  The Harvard Review
• Best Diaper at the Disco The choreography in this gleeful piece of dance-theater ranges from John Travolta disco points to a diaper-clad Fagan marching around stage like a toddler.
  The Brooklyn Rail
• Immigrant Theatermakers Take Center Stage at Global Forms A conversation with curator James Clements and playwright Francisco Mendoza, theatermakers supporting the next generation of immigrant artists.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• Up for Debate: Is ‘Trophy Boys’ Successful in Analyzing Masculinity? Point of order: we—Kyle Turner, Billy McEntee, and Catherine Sawoski—have written about Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, dissecting its demerits, design, and debate, in that order.
  3Views on Theater
• “Rainbird” Ascends into the Ethereal An experimental opera about death and resurrection uses music to craft a haunting sonic whole.
  IMPULSE Magazine
• Eric Bogosian’s HUMPTY DUMPTY Shows Its Age. The play begins and ends in flat, monotone, one-sided conversations, the cast delivering their lines in rote repetition to the receiver.
  Culturebot
• Outside the Box Files boxes labeled with lesbian innuendos begin our surreal and sensual trip through the queer archives
  IMPULSE Magazine
• 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
• 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