Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

Earlier this year, F. Murray Abraham starred in Samuel Beckett's bleakly witty 1958 one-act Krapp's Last Tape at the Irish Rep, playing a bitter man reflecting on his wasted life as he listens to recordings he made 30 years earlier. Now the Irish film and stage star Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) gives another Krapp in a two-week run at the Skirball Center. This iteration, directed by Vicky Featherstone, ran in London earlier this year after prior engagements in Ireland and Australia; the tapes that Krapp listens to onstage were recorded by Rea himself 12 years ago, in anticipation that he would one day play this role.  

In recent years, the Skirball Center has become New York's top landing zone for Europe's most outré avant garde theater and dance. This production, the U.S. debut of the Oslo company Susie Wang, continues that tradition with Trine Falch's creepy and surreal horror-comedy thriller, set in American hotel lobby and rendered in a style that might be described as extreme Southern Gothic. Among the attractions are blood, dismemberment, cannibalism and a briefcase stuffed with a mother's remains. Susie Wang is only here for a week, so you have just five chances to see this—if you dare.