The Dark Outside

Playwright Bernard Kops, now 95, is one of Europe’s best-known and most admired playwrights. The late Michael Kustow, the Polish-born critic, scholar and philosopher of theater, was a leading commentator on Kops’s work. He wrote in The Times of London, “If [Arnold] Wesker began as the realist Edward Hopper of British Jewish theatre, Bernard Kops was and remains its dreamlike Chagall.” In Kops’ latest play, The Dark Outside, a birthday celebration for a one-armed East London tailor, who is in a life crisis, brings home his three grown children. All are facing traumatic changes. It falls to his wife — the family matriarch and unfailing strength — to hold the clan together. Songs and poetic outbursts are inspired because plain speech is insufficient for the family’s powerful feelings. Stars Austin Pendleton as the tailor and New York actor Katharine Cullison, for whom the part was written, as his wife. Jack F. Serio directs.