Greg Machlin

One of the most successfully ambitious Fringe shows I've seen in years! Writer Greg Crafts and director Corey Lynn Howe--along with great choreography/fight choreography by Soda Persi--craft a piece of superhero pop art for the ages while telling a timely story of gender equality and toxic masculinity that still manages to be a lot of fun. The play's story is extremely well-crafted (no pun intended), but I can't reveal much of it without spoiling some fun twists. ... full review

(Full disclosure: I am an acquaintance of Laura's, but don't know her particularly well.) How to Hate Yourself is a great sendup of the super-pumped up self-help infomercials that's wrapped around a moving, courageous one-woman show. House's stand-up training serves her well in both her writing and acting, and she's clearly committed to being as unsentimental, rigorously honest, and funny, as possible. The one-woman portions of the show touch on a lot of stuff, from her challenge to find her b... full review

This is the most gloriously insane and fanatically irreverent production of a Shakespeare play I've ever seen--and that's a very good thing. Very few directors would have the guts to add an entire alien invasion framing device to a Shakespeare comedy, but I'll be damned if Megan Kelly and Kate Grabeau's adaptation doesn't pull it off by being ludicrously unfaithful to the show and actually writing at least one new iambic pentameter monologue detailing a horrific alien saucer, delivered with smart... full review

What you have here is an extremely well-directed, well-acted, well-designed play, and everyone involved deserves substantial credit for that. The gutsy performances by Chris Illing and Michal Sinnott are worth the price of admission alone, and Arthur Keng is mesmerizing in his one scene. But this is a play we've seen before. It's a more insane version than most variations--and apparently completely sincere--but it's one of these four-character New York plays about horrible, screwed-up people ... full review

Jen Silverman is an up-and-coming playwright (Lark Playwrights' Lab, Fusion Festival in New Mexico, U of Iowa MFA) and she does not disappoint here, with the taut, tense story of two drifters living in an abandoned summer home when the rich owner's niece surprises them. But they've all got overlapping agendas, and the niece has a plan of her own... Silverman (inspired by Pinter's "The Caretaker," but with more immediate flesh-and-blood, less elliptical characters) got a knack for high-stakes... full review

A disturbing and necessary piece that builds to a shocking conclusion, Matt Benyo's "Nostalgium" explores one late-night meeting between Sandra, a former addict with a troubled past (well played by Tracy Dillon), and Luke (Luke Scroggins), a young poet. Sandra's clearly bothered by something, and while Luke's a good listener, his real passion is for discussing religion, poetry, and his idea for a mix between nostalgia and delirium. As the evening goes on, Sandra reveals a series of increasingly d... full review