“Kimberly Akimbo” is about two young people who have an incredibly hopeful perspective on life. But it’s also quietly about childhood trauma.

The ambitions of these two comedies could hardly be more disparate, yet the craft employed in both is rooted in similarly precise calibrations of our attention and sympathies.

Three strong new revivals offer an instructive comparative lens through which to view the form’s development over the decades. 

In these Lenten and Easter days in which the church celebrates a man whose divinity was revealed in his willingness to sacrifice everything for love, consider "Sweeney Todd" to be that story’s dark, demonic twin.

“Love,” a new play by Alexander Zeldin, is not a grim report on poverty nor a blistering call for social reform, but simply lets the poor speak their own stories.

A lovingly crafted new revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music makes a fresh case for reconsideration of Lorraine Hansberry's less well-known second play, which followed the classic “A Raisin in the Sun.”