Oh, can Stephen Adly Guirgis write! Sometimes, lines of dialogue he's imagined flash blindingly from the stage like light reflected on shards of broken glass. He's such an inspired playwright that in his often-thrilling
The Little Flower of East Orange, at the Public Theater, he tops everything he's had his characters say with an especially penetrating final line that registers like a prayer's grace at the end of a sermon.



Where Guirgis falls short with this new, not-so-subtly religious play -- a co-production of The Pubic and the LAByrinth Theatre Company -- is in the construction. Under frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman's unsteady direction, the work is so full of id[...]