Articles by: Patrick Maley

Patrick Maley is an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College in Hackettstown NJ, where he teaches courses in Shakespeare, Drama, the Bible, and Classics. He holds a PhD in English and MAs in English and Classical Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. He researches and writes widely on drama, theater, and critical theory, with a particular interest in modern and contemporary American and Irish drama, as well as tragedy of all ages. His scholarship appears in academic journals such as Modern Drama, New Hibernia Review, and The Eugene O'Neill Review. Patrick can be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com, and followed on Twitter: @PatrickJMaley.

Looking at the set of Annie Baker’s THE FLICK at Playwrights Horizons is a surreal experience. Meticulously recreating the theater of a rundown one-screen movie house, David Zinn’s gorgeously drab set, replete with grungy aisle carpet, stained ceiling tiles, and worn seat cushions, consists of rows of chairs facing the [...]

“Give me life!” cries Falstaff famously on the battlefield of Shrewsbury. Director Davis McCallum and the rest of the cast and crew of the Pearl Theatre Company’s current production of HENRY IV, PART ONE would have done well to listen to him. After a lively song and dance number added [...]

How do you like your Irish? Drunk? Brawling? Dancing a jig? Charmingly superstitious? Fastidiously religious? Well pick a stereotype—any stereotype!—DONNYBROOK! has got them all in one convenient evening’s package. Based on the 1952 film THE QUIET MAN, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, DONNYBROOK! takes us to rural Innisfree, Ireland [...]

HAMLET is a monumental undertaking. Spanning large swaths of location and time, containing close to two dozen characters, and carrying the baggage of hundreds of years of unparalleled theatrical and philosophical debate, the play demands a staging that is as meticulous as it is committed to the gravity of Shakespeare’s [...]

We may know August Wilson as a playwright and not a bluesman, but if ever the two arts can coverage in an ideal synchronicity, it is in the work of Mr. Wilson. I do not mean that he was a master at integrating music into his plays, which is true [...]

David Lindsay-Abaire’s highly acclaimed and oft-produced play about American class divide and the perspectives that define it, now receiving a lively staging at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse, is brimming with lightning-quick wit, but beyond the regularly hilarious dialogue lies a penetrating and unsentimental examination of life and ethos at [...]

Late in the third act of Edward Albee’s A DELICATE BALANCE, Agnes, the long-suffering wife, mother, and sister at the center of the play’s psychological examination of the distress wrought by tedium, says “Time. Time happens, I suppose. To people. Everything becomes… too late, finally.” The same would seem to [...]

Water, whether it is a spoonful or an ocean, is really just a collection of droplets, themselves a collection of molecules that have united to form a larger whole. Through cohesion and community, water forms a body that relies on all its individual parts for strength, definition, and unity. Quiara [...]

It is off-putting as an audience member to be thrust immediately into a Ku Klux Klan meeting as a play opens. It is further cringe-inducing to be implicated in that meeting as the leader addresses the audience directly while cheering with graphic and vitriolic specificity “the hero who killed Martin [...]

In the post-PRODUCERS, post-Disney world of musical theater, newly staged musicals often seem only to be safe remakes of well well-worn classics with solid vehicles for star power, or adaptations of beloved films sure to attract a broad crowd of movie lovers to the theater. The common denominator is the [...]

The text of August Wilson’s plays are less scripts than they are scores. Even when his characters are not singing, they are maneuvering their language through a free form prose poetry that blurs the distinction between word and song. The effect is to give the play a sense of ritual, [...]

The lights are on at Two River, and the curtain is again up on Michael Sexton’s gritty and high-concept HENRY V, a bold piece of theater that deserves far better than the shortened run Hurricane Sandy has imposed on it. It is of course tempting to call the gutsy cast [...]

There’s a thin threshold between imagination and insanity, one defined only by level of commitment. To imagine is to escape reality temporarily, with the promise of returning before long. To go insane is to give oneself over to imagination fully and wholeheartedly. MAN OF LA MANCHA straddles this narrow threshold. [...]

I hereby nominate Elevator Repair Service’s THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES) for the coveted honor of “The Booziest Play Ever.” Who are its challengers? THE ICEMAN COMETH? Maybe, but most of Hope’s customers are in a constant state of drunkenness rather than a constant state of drinking. Albee’s George [...]

The United States’s recent high unemployment has forced us to reassess what it is we hope for from a job. Money? Sure. Security? For some. Usually though, the most basic guarantees of a mundane office job are a place to go and people to be with. These benefits may be [...]

The knowledge that death is inevitable brings with it a certain freedom. It alleviates fret over details in the vain hope of altering an assured outcome and, more importantly, it allows for deep introspection into the conditions surrounding that outcome. When done well, historical drama exploits this freedom to its [...]

If the George Street Playhouse’s set for ONE SLIGHT HITCH looks familiar, that’s because it occupied prime time television screens for close to fifteen years in the eighties and nineties. Featuring a center-stage couch, stairs to an unseen second floor, an archway offering a glimpse into the dining room, and [...]

Backed into a corner without a clear escape route and little-to-no support, a man can react in any number of ways. He can grow violent; he can cower and crumble; he can offer appeals for reason. Or he can shout in defiance of the powers that forced him into the [...]

As The Actors Company Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s lovely and under-produced LOVERS opens, an angsty Maggie (Justine Salata) appears in her sweater and ankle-length Catholic school skirt to put on an old record. The raw snarl of a young Van Morrison emerges from the speakers, and Maggie fixes her [...]

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE (hereafter “VSMS” because, well… come on) opens in the quiescent sunroom of a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse as the first two of its title characters gaze out over a pond. During a spat about the morning coffee ritual, Sonia (Kristine Nielsen) hurls two full [...]