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- January 4, 1988THEATERBEST OF '87
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- HUNTING COCKROACHES A vibrant farce by Polish Emigre Janusz
- Glowacki evoking the plight of refugee intellectuals: an
- actress who cannot overcome her glottal-stop accent and her
- novelist husband who looks for his lost sense of context and
- insight by puzzling over the rectilinear shapes of Western
- states on his map.
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- INTO THE WOODS Stephen Sondheim's best musical yet, gorgeous
- to look at and haunting to hear. A fractured fairy tale
- bringing into the same forest Cinderella, Rapunzel and the like
- and asking what comes after happily-ever-after.
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- JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE At the Yale Rep and on tour, a
- shimmering, mysterious depiction of rootless and religiously
- obsessed blacks in the early 20th century. The best work of
- August Wilson, the stage's foremost poet of the American black
- experience, who this year won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for
- Fences when it reached Broadway.
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- LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Choderlos de Laclos's classic
- epistolary novel of sexual conquest and betrayal, given
- entrancing with and apocalyptic power by Adapter Christopher
- Hampton and a dazzling Royal Shakespeare Company production.
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- THE MAHABHARATA A 9 1/2-hour adaptation by Peter Brook, elder
- statesman of the avant-garde, of the great Hindu antiwar epic.
- Inevitable longueurs and some uncertain English from a polyglot
- cast, but spellbinding ritual and visual metaphor.
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- LES MISERABLES Victor Hugo's unforgettable story set to an
- emotion- drenched score. Throbbing with outrage yet, in the
- nonpareil staging by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, exalting.
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- THE ROAD TO MECCA Athol Fugard's almost Ibsenesque musing about
- the conflict between an independent artist and orderly society.
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- SWEET SUE A.R. Gurney Jr.'s wry May-September romance, with
- each of its two characters represented by two actors, not as a
- gimmick but as a reflection of the underlying theme: that the
- real action in anyone's life takes place inside his or her own
- head.
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- THREE POSTCARDS A delicately surreal play with music bringing
- together three women for a dinner that yields expected
- revelations in unexpected ways. From South Coast Rep in Costa
- Mesa, Calif., an unlikely but thriving venue for new work.
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- A WALK IN THE WOODS From Yale, Lee Blessing's witty and
- provocative two-hander, debating, of all things, nuclear
- disarmament, via the Geneva chats of a Soviet and a U.S.
- negotiator.
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