Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is the archetypal modern classic about a sexy woman. Precisely for that reason, it’s a very tough nut to crack today, no less for adaptors than for directors of the original texts. Wedekind’s first version, a 5-act “monster tragedy” written in 1894—about a sensuous young woman exploited, objectified and loved by a series of husbands and other men before being murdered by Jack the Ripper—couldn’t get past the German censor. So Wedekind fiddled with it for

In the winter of 1977, at age 17, I played Petruchio/Fred Graham in a Kiss Me, Kate production at my high school in suburban Baltimore. It’s a crazy thing, but I loved this show from a very early age. That’s because, about six or seven years earlier, I’d watched my father play Petruchio/Fred Graham in a community theater production of the show in the New Jersey town where we lived at that time. Since seeing my father perform, I’d played the original cast album a hundred thous

I want the experience for the audience to be a sort of speeding train that gets completely and totally out of hand. --Robert O’Hara (New York Times interview, Dec. 20, 2017) Robert O’Hara’s Mankind, directed by the author at Playwrights Horizons, is a play desperately trying to get in trouble. It satirizes religion, men, feminism, social conservatism, and hookup culture, all with the same sassy irreverence. The trouble is, effective satire works through precision