Is Richard Maxwell a genius?

Good Samaritans, which just closed at St. Ann's Warehouse, is a very good play, written with an unspairing understanding of everyday speech and everyday pathos, delivered through deliberately stilted acting performances (one of the two leads is a nurse by profession) that denaturalize stage convention and thereby leave the bodies of the performers, (or is it the characters?), exposed, unprotected, and vulnerable in a way I was unprepared for and utterly convinced by.

The Downtown Plays, a series of short and often humorous vignettes that is playing as part of the Tribeca Theatre Festival, has some winners. David Henry Hwang's Trying To Find Chinatown explored the gap between race and culture to convincing effect. My Beautiful Goddamn City by Jon Robin Baitz went on just a little too long, but was otherwise poignant in its evocation of that thought that haunts many of us: the thought of leaving New York. I didn't care for the Paul Rudnick or Wendy Wasserstein slapstick.