Water can be a source of life, recreation, and freedom, but it can also carry painful histories of exclusion and struggle. In Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home, water becomes the foundation of a family’s fight for racial equality and a daughter’s journey toward understanding her past. Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, the production brings together a talented ensemble and imaginative scenic design for an intimate exploration of family relationships.
Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, the fiery one-act that launched his playwriting career in the depths of the Great Depression in 1935, moves through seven scenes, from a union hall to a desperate family trying to put food on the table. As critic Harold Clurman recalled in a 1963 appreciation of Odets, “though he had a thrilling gift for dialogue, he was no literary man.” Steven Pasquale’s production for Classic Stage Company, however, intersperses protest songs and dance sequences among the scenes. Although well performed, they dilute the raw intensity of the original.
With a title like The Unbelievers and a stage half filled with church pews, one might expect some discourse on religion from Nick Payne’s latest drama. Instead, the Manhattan Theatre Club production offers nearly two intermissionless hours of tedious conversation and few significant insights on any topic. A stellar performance by Lauren Ambrose is the U.K.-set play’s saving grace.
Tristan & Yseult, Emma Rice’s exuberant reimagining of the legendary medieval romance, transforms a tragic tale of forbidden love into a theatrically inventive blend of music, irreverent humor, and physical comedy. With a live band, imaginative staging, and a playful sensibility, Rice, who directs, creates a production that moves effortlessly between laughter and heartbreak, breathing fresh life into this timeless love story.
Since 2010’s That Hopey Changey Thing, Off-Broadway theatergoers have fretted over American politics alongside the Apple family, denizens of the Hudson Valley village of Rhinebeck. With We’ll See now at the Public Theater, playwright and director Richard Nelson presents the 13th installment of his “Rhinebeck Panorama” and his eighth Apple play (counting three COVID live streams). Thanks to a familiar and remarkable ensemble, and Nelson’s signature fly-on-the-wall naturalism, We’ll See achieves its quiet, bittersweet power by placing larger political concerns alongside the hyper-specific and finely drawn relationships of its characters.
Water can be a source of life, recreation, and freedom, but it can also carry painful histories of exclusion and struggle. In Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home, water becomes the foundation of a family’s fight for racial equality and a daughter’s journey toward understanding her past. Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, the production brings together a talented ensemble and imaginative scenic design for an intimate exploration of family relationships.
Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, the fiery one-act that launched his playwriting career in the depths of the Great Depression in 1935, moves through seven scenes, from a union hall to a desperate family trying to put food on the table. As critic Harold Clurman recalled in a 1963 appreciation of Odets, “though he had a thrilling gift for dialogue, he was no literary man.” Steven Pasquale’s production for Classic Stage Company, however, intersperses protest songs and dance sequences among the scenes. Although well performed, they dilute the raw intensity of the original.
With a title like The Unbelievers and a stage half filled with church pews, one might expect some discourse on religion from Nick Payne’s latest drama. Instead, the Manhattan Theatre Club production offers nearly two intermissionless hours of tedious conversation and few significant insights on any topic. A stellar performance by Lauren Ambrose is the U.K.-set play’s saving grace.
Tristan & Yseult, Emma Rice’s exuberant reimagining of the legendary medieval romance, transforms a tragic tale of forbidden love into a theatrically inventive blend of music, irreverent humor, and physical comedy. With a live band, imaginative staging, and a playful sensibility, Rice, who directs, creates a production that moves effortlessly between laughter and heartbreak, breathing fresh life into this timeless love story.
Since 2010’s That Hopey Changey Thing, Off-Broadway theatergoers have fretted over American politics alongside the Apple family, denizens of the Hudson Valley village of Rhinebeck. With We’ll See now at the Public Theater, playwright and director Richard Nelson presents the 13th installment of his “Rhinebeck Panorama” and his eighth Apple play (counting three COVID live streams). Thanks to a familiar and remarkable ensemble, and Nelson’s signature fly-on-the-wall naturalism, We’ll See achieves its quiet, bittersweet power by placing larger political concerns alongside the hyper-specific and finely drawn relationships of its characters.
Welcome to a 21st-century American Jewish home, where whatever comes along is embraced with love—with some exceptions. Debbie Goodstein’s The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue introduces a prototypically eclectic family, who bear little resemblance to the Jews of their great-grandparents’ era.
In Dan Giles’s play The Charioteer, two siblings attempt to forge a relationship despite their reluctance to share their true feelings, wanting to connect but unsure of themselves. High school senior Charly (Mia Wurgaft) visits her brother Owen (Jake Horowitz) at college and has her first drink—and her first experience of getting blackout drunk. Owen, who went away to college a few years earlier, has essentially abandoned his family. Owen takes Charly along to an anarchist house party, where he essentially abandons her in favor of spending the night trying to reconcile with his ex-girlfriend Ellen.
Parcel from America subtitles itself “The Irish Musical,” and begorra, is it ever. A near-original, loosely adapted from a story by Tomáseen Foley, with music by Malcolm Hillgartner and Kevin Corcoran and book by Hillgartner, Jahnna Beecham, and Michael J. Hume, it wears its Irishness on its sleeve—not to mention on its brogues, its Aran sweaters, and set designer Harry Feiner’s evocative County Limerick backdrop. A placid evening, with goodhearted small-towners looking after one another and banding together as a community when one of its own is suffering, it’s a feel-good show, and a welcome one.
Jen Diamond has invented a deadly contagious disease, named her play after it, and set the drama during an outbreak. What is truly infectious in The Morbs, though, are its other storyline—about three former sorority sisters reuniting after several years—and the trio of dynamic performances that bring it to life.
Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford, is a visually arresting musical whose dark, decadent atmosphere proves more compelling than its book. Though the production’s inventive design draws audiences into the seedy world of a Parisian brothel, the visual experience ultimately outshines the material it serves.
In the post–World War II U.S.S.R., and in its satellites in Eastern Europe, any way of thinking that did not conform to Communist—that is, Stalinist—ideology was considered treasonous. Suspected traitors were tortured, imprisoned, and executed. The most rudimentary rigged trials were conducted, and the outcomes were predetermined. Laura Zlatos’ Show Trial gives a satirical spin to the actual trial of Milada Horakova, a 50-year-old women’s rights activist and parliamentarian, in 1949.
King of the Yees, playwright Lauren Yee’s most recent play, packs a comic punch that rattles the mind into a state of confusion. If the objective is to pack as much comedy as possible into a two-hour play about a daughter’s appreciation of her father, then well done. However, Joshua Kahan Brody’s direction sets such a frantic pace that one frequently finds oneself asking: What is happening now, and who is that? And because three of the actors play no fewer than six characters each, the production has the feel of a madcap comedy. It is a silly and sentimental story.
No symbol is more overused in the arts than the human heart. Served cold, golden, or on one’s sleeve, it has been the stuff of countless theatrical metaphors, from the plays of Euripides to Larry Kramer. The Roundabout Theatre Company has, nonetheless, doubled down on the image for its plainly named yet surprisingly complex medical musical, The Heart. Happily, it is a gamble that pays off. Kait Kerrigan’s book mostly avoids sentimentality in favor of scientific facts and hard emotional truths, while the husband and wife team of Ian and Anne Eisendrath deliver a pulsating score, anchored in the realm of electronic dance music.
When there is a generation gap, when communication between children and parents goes awry, it often stems from divergent views, sometimes political, sometimes value-based, and sometimes both. Those parents who struggle to ease their children’s lives by providing them with material comforts that they themselves lacked are often disappointed when their kids reject affluence, and risk their financial or physical security for a greater “cause.” That is the case in playwright David Zax’s Aftermath.
If you missed the avant-garde theater scene in New York City during the 1960s and ’70s, The Kick Inside serves as a time capsule, catapulting its audiences back to the heyday of experimental theater. Directed with a steady hand by Nicolás Noreña, this collection of 12 vignettes by a range of playwrights, from Richard Foreman to Penny Arcade, takes its viewers on a madcap linguistic, visual, and physical journey to that era, with an occasional modern touch to the retro material.
Anthropomorphism is at the center of The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., David Javerbaum’s cleverly conceived work about dogs and their views of the world. Directed by Richard Israel, it’s playing at the Triad, the original home of Celebrity Autobiography. The Dog Show adopts a similar format as that hit: actors reading from scripts, mostly at stands. But it’s no less enjoyable for that: a winning cast of four helps the unflashy production breed satisfaction for its audience.
Though advertised as “a new play,” Matthew Freeman’s The Ask, now at Theater 555, premiered in New York City more than two years ago. In this drama of ideas, two strong-willed strangers clash in a mating dance essential to American charities: the solicitation of wealthy donors by career fund-raisers. Back in 2024, The Ask--expertly directed by Jessi D. Hill--packed the same wallop it does now (and even more, thanks to the superb performance of Betsy Aidem as Greta); but the original run was brief and so far Off-Broadway that it failed to create the splash that might have been expected. Now, in a more prominent venue, again directed by Hill, this substantial intermissionless drama is likely to make waves and, in due course, be seen around the country.
Cicely Hamilton’s Phyl, a 1911 comedy that challenges the constraints imposed on women of the early suffragist era, is receiving its New York premiere from the Mint Theater Company. This rarely seen work by Hamilton—a leading British women’s rights activist—introduces a spirited heroine determined to break free from isolation and convention. Under Britt Berke’s direction, Phyl reveals the quiet radicalism of its heroine’s determination to pursue the life she desires.
As a portrait of two relationships imploding when the couples are confined together, Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning provides 90 minutes of fiercely acted, propulsive drama. As a portrait of AI’s expanding influence in our lives, however, it underwhelms.
Life for blacks in the antebellum South, during the Civil War, and for generations thereafter consisted of a confluence of injustices at the intersection of class, race, and gender. Todrick Hall's complex new musical Midnight grapples with those injustices by reimagining what it might be like if the oppressors became the oppressed.
