'Almost Home' is totally great!(News)

'Someone -- was it Van Gogh? -- said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.'

This is from author Donna Tartt. She has her young "incorrigibles'' using this as a toast in the novel, "The Secret History.''

And all this was written before anyone had thought of the show title, "Orange Is the New Black,'' and before ISIS started using orange jumpsuits on their victims in their hideous videos, and then orange was the favorite color of my old friend, the late Frank Sinatra.

Orange? The new black, indeed!

RECOMMENDED: The brand-new play titled "Almost Home'' by Walter Anderson at the Acorn Theatre on West 42nd Street. It plays there through Oct. 12.

New playwright Anderson has always had his hand on the pulse of U.S. readers. He was the editor-in-chief of the wildly popular Parade magazine, which Conde Nast inserted in newspapers coast-to-coast in the days when newsprint was ubiquitous.

Now, Anderson introduces us to the perils of a returned Vietnam vet, a Marine who is the son of a World War II vet. He comes back to a grim New York apartment and all the uncertainties of that time. (It is an interesting echoing of our current preoccupation with veterans and wars we don't want and their ongoing toll.)

Director Michael Parva and the cast are extraordinary...