Who will free us from the handsome British issue drama? Plays that float across the Atlantic on clouds of critical praise with sumptuous, starkly modern whizbang production design—lord how much funding you all have over us Americans—and which purport to tackle serious issues, but exhibit, once you scratch past the hard lighting and drum-forward soundscapes, a facile shallowness. Earlier this fall on Broadway, we had Will Graham’s swing at masculinity in Punch , and before that, his Rupert Murdoch in Ink ; there’s also been Suzie Miller’s legal drama about sexual assault Prima Facie , pulsingly directed by Justin Martin, and Peter Morgan’s Patriots , a peek behind the rise of Putin. A summit of the form would be The Lehman Trilogy , where Sam Mendes unleashed every drama

See Full Page