Chris Braak's Blog

WAITING FOR GODOT at Curio Theater

Here I have got some opinions on Curio Theater Company’s production of Waiting for Godot, you are permitted to read them. GODOT at CurioFiled under: Threat Quality

CONSTELLATIONS at the Wilma Theater

Good grief. Here’s a show at the Wilma Theater, it got pretty strong reviews, a rave from a colleague of mine over at the Broad Street Review, the fellow who wrote it — Nick Payne — won some kind of British award for it. And this is very mysterious to me, because I think this play is quite terrible, […]

Are Liberals Silencing Dissent? No, Stu Bykofsky Is an Idiot

I am, as we all well know, a person of no particular credentials, of no particular reach, of no particular importance, and so it’s fairly reasonable for me to spend my lunch hour just messing around with words on the internet. I’ve got no obligation to address the news of the day, or to make […]

Is Paul Bloom Right About Empathy? No.

(I know I said this was only theater reviews now, but whatever, I need to do something with my life guys, I need to feel like it has meaning.) I want to write briefly about this “Yale Psychologist Says Pizzagate Gunman Has Too Much Empathy” and I need a little more room than a Twitter […]

All’s Well that Ends Well at PAC

​In times of strife, sometimes we find illumination in complexity and melancholy. To that end, director Dan Hodge at the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective serves up All’s Well that Ends Well, a rarely-performed Shakespearean “problem play”: A beast neither comedy, nor tragedy, nor history. Read More at the Broad Street ReviewFiled under: Threat Quality

An Iliad at the Lantern Theater

The prevailing feeling of war, maybe more than fear or dread, is exhaustion.  More than a decade into the longest and most wearying armed conflicts in U.S. history, M. Craig Getting directs a heart-breaking adaptation of the western world’s very oldest war story: An Iliad, at the Lantern Theater. An Iliad, adapted by playwrights Lisa […]

José Rivera’s ‘Marisol’ and the warnings we missed

There’s seven weeks left in an annus horribilis for the record books, a relentless, daily reminder that the world is not okay, has maybe never been okay, is maybe never going to be okay. The world is not good, but there are still good things in it, and it’s vital that we find them and experience them while we […]

How I Mean to Cast My Vote

(I know I said this is a theater review website now, and it is, this is a momentary diversion that I’ve been meaning to write for a while, I’ll get back to the real good stuff after the election.) Got to vote tomorrow, got to make some decisions.  I am going to lay out my […]

Theater Review: Breathe Smoke

(Broad Street Review does this thing where they’ll publish your review if it’s different enough from another review they ran, but they won’t tell you if they’re going to pay for it until after you’ve written it.  I am not *real* happy with this practice, but what else am I going to do, who knows. […]

Review: Breaking the Waves

(I got about seven months of time left, and without a project my brain is going to start to cannibalize itself, the other day I was so bored at work I started to get high.  I mean, like, really high, like it felt like my consciousness was floating outside my body and drifting away?  Terrible. […]