Paul David Young

Paul David Young is a playwright, critic, and translator. He has two upcoming play premieres: Livia: A Roman Tragedy at The Flea in October 2026, and A Picnic for Orpheus at La MaMa in October 2027.

April 2026Theater

JAMES CLEMENTS with Paul David Young

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Writer/director James Clements's play Beauty Freak, which focuses on the pivotal years from 1935 to 1939, and runs April 23 to May 17 at the cell in Manhattan, is produced by his and Sam Hood Adrain’s company What Will the Neighbors Say? and directed by Danilo Gambini. 

James Clements. Photo: Federica Borlenghi.

April 2025Theater

Caryl Churchill Returns to The Public with Four Scintillating Works

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Caryl Churchill, eighty-six, is a grande dame of British theater, with over thirty works to her credit. Her plays often contain a suppressed violence, a world yielding to disorder and cruelty. She has championed women and other politically and socially vulnerable groups. The texts can be abbreviated, seemingly casual, with the intermittent hard knock of the hammer. Now, four new short plays, Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., have come to The Public.

Deirde O’Connell. Photo: Joan Marcus.

June 2024Theater

Theatertreffen 2024

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The Germans do love their theater, and the annual roundup of the ten best German-language theater productions of the past year, called Theatertreffen, always promises to be a thrilling opportunity to sample the current climate in the theater and the world at large.
Riesenhaft in Mitterlerde. Photo: Fabian Schellhorn. Courtesy Theatertreffen.

November 2023Theater

Listening to the Play: Arin Arbus on Directing Waiting for Godot

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Seventy years after its Paris premiere at Théâtre de Babylone and sixty-eight years since the first English-language production in London, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot takes the stage November 4 at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) in Brooklyn with a stellar cast (Michael Shannon as Estragon, Paul Sparks as Vladimir, Toussaint Francois Battiste as a boy, Jeff Biehl as Lucky, and Ajay Naidu as Pozzo).
Arin Arbus. Photo: Amir Hamja.

June 2023Theater

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's The Comeuppance Goes Where Only Fools Dare: The High School Reunion

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I have never felt the slightest inclination to go to a high school reunion, but apparently many people do in America, and thus a subgenre of film and theater has been created. The premise is that no matter how miserable high school was or how bad your relationships were, you will return to spend a few intoxicated hours with those special people from long ago. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s riff on this genre, The Comeuppance at Signature Theatre, showcases his ease with dialogue as he keeps the action going in a continuous gabfest, seamlessly and artfully directed by Eric Ting, at the pre-party leading up to the reunion.
(l-r): Susannah Flood, Bobby Moreno. Photo: Monique Carboni.

March 2023Theater

The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window Returns to New York Six Decades after its Broadway Premiere

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The BAM Harvey Theater revival of Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, a panorama of early 1960s West Village bohemia, the Bushwick of yesteryear, offers its talented cast many opportunities to show their comic timing, though the production cannot overcome the play's flaws entirely.
Oscar Isaac by Julieta Cervantes.

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