Digitally driven, image laden, and over branded, 21st century contemporary culture has resulted in a yearning for a simpler more streamlined lifestyle. The conspicuous consumption of (practically) any form of minimalist design--whether in fashion, architecture, music, or art--has become an all too powerful coping mechanism.

This week, John Patrick Shanley, who won a Tony and Pultizer for Doubt, debuts his new play entitled Prodigal Son. (Amazingly, there has never been one with that name.) The four-character piece chronicles Shanley's years, from 1965-1968, at a New Hampshire prep school.

I love attempting to craft a little utopia here in our Brooklyn HQ. Where else do you get to pay people -- generously, in cash and through tools, facilities and expertise -- with no purpose but to create and inspire?

Barnsdall Art Park's Municipal Art Gallery hosts perhaps the timeliest of art exhibits, SKIN, on view thru April 17, 2016.

An unruly teen from the Irish tenements of the Bronx is transplanted to a white-bread Catholic prep school on a hilltop in New Hampshire, where his braggadocio, bluster and petty-thievery threaten his escape from the ghetto.

Frazer Harrison via Getty Images

Prodigal Son is a rather placid, familiar play, directly auto-biographical down to the names of many characters but really not concerned with much of anything until an explosion of plot in the last few minutes that comes too little too late.

Waterhouse and Dodd

The winds of change, imaginary currents of invention and practicality, often find their way by slowly drifting into an urban neighborhood that has the potential to be reinvigorated into an area with a more useful purpose.

Gliding into Austin McCormick's world is like waking up in a snow globe, perfect in its stillness, better when shaken. His visual artistry and stagecraft is completely magical and in Snow White, everything but white.