Shawn Brackbill In Joseph Campbell's hugely influential work of comparative mythology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the world's hero myths are boiled down to three narrative stages: the action, the trials, and the hero at home. But what about that fourth stage, when the retired hero is puttering around the house with no greater trial than cleaning the leaves out of the gutter? In mythic figurations: a power triptych, the plight of the washed-up......

It’s almost that time of year when the NYC Fringe Festival dominates the theater scene with hundreds of new shows of wildly varying quality. But before the Fringe sucks the air out of the room in August, it’s worth noting that July is packed with a number of smaller, more manageable and generally more-reliable theater festivals. For starters: The Summer Play Festival: Now in its fifth season, this festival of new plays is being hosted......

For the past four decades, Richard Foreman has challenged and fascinated audiences with a deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic incorporating traces of vaudeville, Jungian philosophy, slapstick, surrealism and myriad other disparate sources to create what he calls the Ontological-Hysteric theater. His newest “theatrical machine”, called Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, is the third in a series of works that heavily emphasize video projection, this time shot on location in Japan. The live performance in Deep Trance has......