Author Bios
Kurt Wenzel
“We’re waiting for Wenzel,” the actor announced to the crowd at Guild Hall, seconds before the opening night of the play “Angry Young Man.” He was helping as an usher and must have read my name from the back of my assigned seat while I made a last-second dash to the lavatory. “Wenzel,” he let everyone know, “went for a tinkle.”
At first glance, “Alarms and Excursions,” running now through June 11 at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue, seems a light romp about the tribulations of contemporary life. Its playwright, Michael Frayn, also wrote “Noises Off,” the hugely successful comedy of manners from the early 1980s. Like its predecessor, “Alarms and Excursions” has plenty of slapstick humor, but it ultimately aims for bigger targets than mere laughs. This production is a slightly abridged version of the original, first performed in London in 1998. The play is a loosely connected series of vignettes about married British couples. Most of the pieces work beautifully, with one or two being merely good. The first — a kinetic sketch about modern technology — is perhaps the funniest. Two couples meet for drinks in an upper-middle-class home. Once introduced they all decide to turn off their cellphones — they are going to chat, face to face, in the human way of the civilized elite. The host produces a bottle of w
Alec Baldwin's memoir is more rueful than contentious, and intermittently evocative and wise.
Gabe McKinley’s drama “Extinction” — running now through April 16 at Guild Hall — sits firmly in the “Men Behaving Badly” genre.