The engaging Trash embellishes a common New York story of two roommates in conflict by adding an important twist, as well as a variety of theatrical tricks, including audience participation. The Deaf creators and lead performers, James Caverly and Andrew Morrill, hold out occasional lifelines to a hearing audience via projections, a talking jukebox, and a character who isn’t Deaf, but just as often they speak in American Sign Language (ASL). Lest anyone balk at that, a good deal of the ASL portions are no more challenging than interpreting gestures in a silent film.
Calf Scramble, the title of Libby Carr’s dynamic new work, is a double entendre. On one hand, it is an event, familiar to many a rodeo goer, that features teens chasing and roping calves to take home and raise as potentially profitable livestock. On the other hand, it is a fitting description of the play’s intent. Five high school girls find themselves as penned in by their circumstances as the calves are by their metal fences. The animalism of humans becomes jumbled with the humanity of animals, and if, at times, Carr lays on the symbolism with a heavy hoof, one must remember that the play is set in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the metaphors.
Many elements of Michael Shaw Fisher’s comedy The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits remind one of other works that use the familiar trope of a childless couple, unable to conceive, going to extreme lengths to become parents. Here, the factors that decide the deal are typical of the darker riff on the Golden Rule—i.e., “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” In Fisher’s 75-minute show at the Fringe Encore Series, fanciful variations on the trope provide enough laughs to forget today’s economic disparities.
Barry Boehm’s play Our House deals partly with family strife—a staple of American drama for a century—with the added difference that four of the six characters are gay. A long night of drinking and drug-taking puts it squarely in the vein of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a show in which one of Boehm’s characters happens to be starring, in a community theater production. More particularly, the primarily gay characters echo any number of engaging dramas, from The Boys in the Band to Love! Valour! Compassion! to My Night with Reg.
Four employees of investment bank Friedman Wallace gather for an “affinity group” meeting. Their affinity? They are women of Chinese descent. Yet Alex Lin chose to name her new play Chinese Republicans. Consider it the first sign of dissonance in Lin’s ineffectual script.
Josh, protagonist of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, is a New York University drama student and veteran blackout drunk. Careless and self-centered, Josh spreads pandemonium wherever he goes. Irksome as this conduct may be for those around him—especially his long-suffering mother (Heidi Armbruster), Josh is an audience charmer. Credit for that goes to Brasch’s wit and an adroit performance by leading-actor Noah Galvin. Yet the achievement of this production owes less to the comic capital of the central character than to the heartfelt depiction of Josh’s grandparents, embodied by four notable veterans of the New York stage: Caroline Aaron, Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, and Chip Zien.
Clare Barron’s 2014 You Got Older is a comedy of many colors. In this revival at the handsomely renovated Cherry Lane Theatre, Freudian fantasy shares the stage with elements of a traditional rom-com, while gross-out jokes demand equal time against moments of heartwarming family humor. But primarily the intermissionless play is a bittersweet buddy comedy, a keenly observed tale of a sick father and the grown daughter who comes home to see him through his illness. Their sporadic bouts of bonding and awkward conversations provide comfort and support, even as their physical bodies and emotional losses betray them.
No one in Aya Ogawa’s Meat Suit ever speaks or explains the title phrase, but based on its use in fantasy literature and a Netflix documentary, it refers to a human body inhabited by a demon or alien. The play’s subtitle, The Shitshow of Motherhood, also conjures a negative impression of motherhood. So, too, does almost everything in the show—and in exhaustingly absurdist fashion. The play may not turn anyone off to motherhood, but it could turn people off to any future theatrical explorations of it.
Hold On to Your Butts, directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, proves that epic spectacle can be conjured from little more than bodies, sound effects, and boundless imagination, as two actors and a sound-effects artist recreate Jurassic Park shot for shot, live onstage. The result is an exuberant collision of physical comedy, sound, and affectionate parody—a love letter to both movies and theater.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is a quotation attributed to French novelist Honoré de Balzac, but it applies directly to the plot of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895). Written close to Wilde’s peak—it opened just a month before The Importance of Being Earnest—Husband fizzes with epigrams and uses heightened language to expose hypocrisy. The Storm Theatre is brave to tackle the work, packed both with melodrama and wit, but to succeed, as Sir Peter Hall did with his Broadway production 30 years ago, requires skills and experience that it can’t altogether muster.
In I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical, written by Alexander S. Bermange and directed by Eamon Foley, four talented performers share their love of musicals—even though their show has just closed unexpectedly. The plucky quartet spends the ensuing 75 minutes delightfully recounting their personal reasons for loving theater while spoofing some of the most popular musicals of all time. Their commitment to the genre is infectious. And even though their love is temporarily unrequited, they wave the banner of devotion like Jean Valjean from Les Misérables, one of the many shows parodied.
Gatz, the signature creation of downtown theater troupe Elevator Repair Service (ERS), included every sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1924 novel The Great Gatsby, with each performance running a whopping eight hours (including intermissions and dinner break). At the Public Theater these days (16 years after Gatz premiered there), ERS is offering its take on Ulysses, the ravishingly innovative novel—serialized in 1918, published in book form in 1922—that secured James Joyce’s position as preeminent pioneer of stream-of-consciousness narrative in English. As with Gatz, the script of Ulysses consists entirely of the novelist’s original prose; this time, though, there are numerous elisions, permitting each performance to clock in at a mere two hours and 40 minutes.
Michael Walek’s The Bookstore is a cozy, unprepossessing play about the power of literature to change one’s life and the importance of both writing and reading. It is also about the people who do one or the other, and those who try to do both, and it’s peppered with nuggets about writers, readers, and the spectrum of human experience.
A work that has been collaboratively devised by members of the Happenstance Theater troupe, Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box cites as its influences the artworks of Joseph Cornell and the French films Amélie (2001) and Mon Oncle (1958). The play, directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Selma Mandell, explores randomness and dissimilarity and focuses on the lives of tenants in a French apartment house through a series of scenes that can be identified from their artistic influences or simply enjoyed as charming vignettes arranged in visually striking tableaux. Either way, the result is a multilayered and curious work that is both thought-provoking and delightful.
Molière’s Tartuffe is robustly reimagined by Lucas Hnath in a randy new version directed by Sarah Benson, turning the classic comedy of hypocrisy into a breathless, contemporary satire. With choreography by Raja Feather Kelly and a fearless cast led by Matthew Broderick and David Cross, the production unleashes ferocious wit and gleeful buffoonery.
When Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life premiered a few days before Christmas in 1946, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther was not exactly filled with glad tidings. “The weakness of this picture,” he bah-humbugged, “is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life.” He observed that the small-town denizens represented in the film, “all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities.” In a return engagement of Irish Repertory Theatre’s It’s a Wonderful Life! A Live Radio Play, Anthony E. Palermo’s adaptation of the film’s screenplay unapologetically leans into the sentimentality and accentuates the theatrical attitudes to deliver a sparkling and joyful Yuletide delight.
Titles, even subtitles, sway playgoers’ expectations. Take, for instance, a recent press performance of Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear. Alex Lin’s new farcical melodrama zips relentlessly around jocose hairpin turns. The dialogue, stylishly delivered by a first-rate cast, is witty, urbane, and frequently arch. Yet the audience—presumably anticipating King Lear or something akin to that monumental tragedy—sat in suspended, churchlike repose throughout the play’s early scenes.
In the U.S. premiere of What If They Ate the Baby? writer-performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland spin a seemingly polite 1950s housewife visit into a hilariously sinister dance of casseroles, secrets, and suburban dread. This queer clown two-hander uses absurdist comedy to probe surveillance, paranoia, and the pressures of American womanhood.
Put two single beds side by side, and the stage is set for a romantic comedy. But what if they are hospital beds? Could a depressing drama be on tap? Not to worry. Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 oddity, Gruesome Playground Injuries, returns to Off-Broadway with plenty of laughs, missed connections, and fleeting kisses. And when things do, on occasion, turn grim, the solid acting, ample stage blood, and traces of vomit make this piece more of a shocker than a bummer. In the reliable hands of veteran director Neil Pepe, it’s a slice-of-life one-act with the emphasis on slice.
If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.
In his current revival of Pygmalion, director David Staller does more than remount Shaw’s 1912 comedy—he alters the play’s architecture by adding a mythic framing device led by four Olympian gods who introduce and comment on the action. This addition is not found in the published script, and theatergoers expecting a traditional revival may consider it a provocation. But Staller positions it as a reclamation rather than an invention.
Although it’s probably not among the top 10 elements for a successful farce, the awkward presence of a corpse has proved comic gold in such plays as Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace and Joe Orton’s Loot. The first few moments of Messy White Gays suggest that playwright Drew Droege may have tapped into the vein as well. In darkness, a crash of breaking glass is heard, and the lights come up suddenly on two young men standing over a body. The corpse is Monty, the third in their throuple. But what ensues is more a nightmare of bad behavior than a comic soufflé.
Right in the middle of election season, 44—The Musical has arrived Off-Broadway. The show takes Barack Obama’s historic rise and views it through a carnival mirror, refracting statesmanship into satire. Written, composed, and directed by former Obama campaign staffer Eli Bauman, it gleefully revisits Obama’s presidency as Joe Biden “kinda sorta” remembers it, complete with political foibles, larger-than-life personalities, and musical swagger.
Relationships are hard—even moreso when you’re working from the literal points of view of both parties. In writer/director/performer Natalie Palamides’ Weer, love takes a dangerous—if a bit weird—turn while jumping through time across the entire lifespan of one couple’s wild relationship. Making its début at the Cherry Lane Theatre, newly reopened under the acclaimed independent film studio A24, the play arrives after a successful run in London.
“Art,” Oscar Wilde pithily postulated, “is useless.” Susannah Dalton’s The Importance of Doing Art directly challenges this aesthetic maxim. Far from being futile, the comedy asserts, art’s true purpose is to serve as an allurement for single-male schlubs and slacker underachievers to attract beautiful, sexually available women. Simply put, art is a chick magnet.
Rarely does a play get off to such a torturous start for its audience like Art of Leaving. The first scene of Anne Marilyn Lucas’s feeble comedy is a portrait of emotional abuse played for laughs, and interrupted only by a tedious monologue about shopping for lunch. Humor in the rest of the play draws on such worn-out sources as Yiddishisms, stereotypes of feminists and Jewish mothers, and mishearing by old people.
The flirtation between theater and television has turned serious in recent seasons. Small-screen favorites Stranger Things and Smash were adapted for Broadway, and Schmigadoon! is on tap for next spring. Meanwhile, Off-Broadway satires of The Office and Friends have settled into long runs. Now add to the lineup Not Ready for Prime Time, a new play by Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers. Neither an adaptation nor a parody, this likable, free-flowing piece is more a biographical comedy, albeit an unauthorized one.
In a spirited revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation, director Austin Pendleton brings fresh verve to the tale of Huey, a lovelorn dreamer who enlists his best friend Aldo to help win back his fiery ex-wife, Janice. The production captures the play’s blend of romantic folly and heartfelt yearning that first endeared it to audiences decades ago.
Anonymously penned scripts are rare—and rarer still when the identity of one of its two characters is obscured. In Murdoch: The Final Interview, a multimedia drama/farce directed by Christopher Scott, that actor portrays both an enigmatic interviewer and media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”