The title of Lia Romeo’s play Still, it must be clarified, is unrelated to manufacturing moonshine in the mountains of Appalachia. Rather, her wistful two-hander is about seniors reconnecting—the kind of story that pops up periodically in bridal pages about two spouses whose longtime partners have died and who have somehow reconnected with their youthful heartthrobs. The stories carry an inherent charm, one that is aided immeasurably by two superb performers, Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly.
In addition to introducing the word robot to the English language, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi drama R.U.R. depicted a dystopian world in which scientifically manufactured laborers gradually eradicate humans. The play perfectly captured the anxieties of the burgeoning Machine Age and was a big hit on Broadway in 1922. S. Asher Gelman’s Scarlett Dreams attempts to tap into similar uneasiness as the former Information Age settles into the current Age of Intelligence. With the meteoric advancement and sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), the play suggests that it may be just a matter of time when people will be controlled by digital avatars, and the difference between reality and virtual reality (VR) will become purely conjectural.
Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in the 1960s by Irish playwright Brian Friel, poignantly captures the anticipation, fear, and excitement of emigrating to a new place. Set on the eve of departure, Friel’s play focuses on Gar, the would-be émigré, in both his Public self (played with subdued melancholy by David McElwee) as he struggles with his decision to leave, and his Private self (played with exuberance by A.J. Shively), screaming to get out. It’s deadly boring in Ballybeg, a tiny little corner of County Donegal, Ireland, where the most exciting things are a game of checkers and memories of teenage shenanigans.
Theatergoers yearning to see a new spin on Macbeth need look no further than Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing). Written and directed by Harris, it is a feminist version of Shakespeare’s original that puts Lady Macbeth at its center. But while Harris succeeds in expanding Lady Macbeth’s presence in the story, ultimately the playwright is defeated in increasing the character’s agency, given Shakespeare’s clear-cut trajectory of the doomed Queen.
Nelson Diaz-Marcano wrote Las Borinqueñas to honor Puerto Rican women, like his mother and grandmothers, who work hard, raise children and serve their communities. But his bilingual play’s awkwardly presented fact-based component—concerning the clinical trials for the first birth control pill, which were conducted in Puerto Rico in the 1950s—seems to get in the way of his affectionate personal portrait.
“What’s the matter, Mary Jane?” Alanis Morissette sang in 1995. “You never seem to want to dance anymore.” She could have been singing to the eponymous protagonist of Amy Herzog’s understated new play, who would love to dance, or smoke pot, or hike in the mountains, but all her time and energy are taken up caring for her severely ill 2½-year old son, Alex.
The SoHo Playhouse is hosting the 2017 Fringe International Encore Series through Oct. 22. The lineup includes mostly international productions: from Adelaide, Australia; Brighton, England; Edinburgh; Hollywood; and Winnipeg, Canada, among other places. The offerings include Irish standup comedian Jimeoin; the play Mengele, about the disgraced Nazi doctor who escaped to South America; Shell Shock, a play adapted from the memoirs of an American veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Macbeth Muet, a comical silent version of Macbeth performed by two actors; and Turbulence!, a Hollywood Fringe Festival winner for Best Musical that takes place in 4242 and involves Earthlings and Martians. For tickets and information on all the productions, visit www.sohoplayhouse.com/fringe-encore-series-2016.
Classic Stage Company’s production of As You Like It is the latest act in Artistic Director John Doyle’s personal project to revivify the classics by whittling them down to their fundamentals. As with his CSC staging of John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures earlier this year, Doyle has slashed the text to its barest of bones and reduced scenic demands to a few plucky strokes. The approach neutered Pacific Overtures, but has made Shakespeare’s breeziest, most joyful romantic comedy even breezier.
Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange has developed a life of its own. It doesn’t have the worldwide instant-recognition factor of a Wizard of Oz or a Mickey Mouse, but the opening image of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex deLarge in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film is etched in the consciousness of anyone who’s even tangentially encountered the film: chin tucked, eyes leering under the brim of his bowler hat, mouth an inscrutable half-simper, flamboyant fake eyelashes ringing his right eye. No company Halloween party is complete without a Brad or a Dave in deLarge drag. The latest in a long line of theatrical adaptations of A Clockwork Orange, which opened this week at New World Stages, both banks on and challenges this brand awareness, refining the narrative into a piquant, overheated slab of physical theater about the roots of white violence that is part male revue, part alt-rock dream ballet.
MCC Theater has announced the complete cast and creative team for 2017-18 Tow Playwright-in-Residence Jocelyn Bioh’s Happiness and Joe, the third of the 2017 PlayLabs readings. Directed by Saheem Ali, the cast of Happiness and Joe will include Joaquina Kalukango and Austin Smith; the reading will be at 7 p.m. on Oct. 2. The final of the 2017 PlayLabs readings, Lily Houghton’s Dear, will be held at 7 p.m. on Oct. 16; directed by Jenna Worsham, the cast of Dear will include Michele Selene Ang, Lilly Englert, and Coral Peña. Both readings will take place at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.). Dear is sold out, but $15 tickets are still available for Happiness and Joe. Both performances will include a reception afterward with the artists and MCC leadership. For tickets and more information, visit www.mcctheater.org.
The tension between a powerful social hierarchy and an unconventional hero, often an underdog, provides a frequent source of mid-20th-century American comedy. The friction arises in Mary Chase’s Harvey, Abe Burrows, Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac, Philip Barry’s Holiday, and Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mr. Roberts. The sympathy for the heroes of those comedies is a foregone conclusion: they are on the side of the angels, as it were. But that’s surprisingly not the case in George Kelly’s The Show-Off, a hard-edged 1920s work admirably revived by the Peccadillo Theater Company. Kelly’s title character, Aubrey Piper, is a great creation, an annoying rascal and a liar, and one waits impatiently for him to get his comeuppance.
Although the slang term for heterosexuals is the title of Dan Giles’s new play, it doesn’t technically apply to the main human characters, a gay couple, but rather to a pair of hamsters that they are looking after. Giles’s amusing and well-acted comedy has a great deal to say about both sexual and parental love; about the open discussion necessary to keep relationships functioning; and about the neuroses that all couples in the animal kingdom experience.
Ars Nova’s KPOP begins with a chorus of glittering young Korean pop performers belting the lyrics “the future’s standing right in front of you.” Indeed, the purported mission of the play’s fictional management enterprise, JTM Entertainment, is to bring K-Pop to American audiences, and the production delivers K-Pop-styled numbers in droves.
Pop Punk High, a new musical by Ben Lapidus and Anderson Cook that parodies and celebrates the pop punk bands of the 2000s, will begin a run of Thursday nights at the Parkside Lounge on Oct. 12 and play through Nov. 30 (except for Thanksgiving).
The show, directed by Felicia Lobo, will be performed at the historic Parkside Lounge at 317 E. Houston St. on the Lower East Side. Pop Punk High tells the story of a high school where everyone is pop punk, it’s always 2006, and there’s never been anything cooler than shredding, pizza, and flipping off your lame-ass parents. The shows will be performed at 8 p.m. and run for 65 minutes. Tickets are available online at poppunkhigh.com or at the door.
Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays always speak their own language, but in 2000’s Fucking A the playwright one-upped herself. The women of the play have developed their own semi-secret language called TALK that allows them to hide in plain sight among callous men. It’s as beautiful and elegant an illustration of female solidarity as any in Parks’s work, and indicative of her gift for fashioning skewed worlds that make us see our own world anew. She doesn’t so much pull back the curtain as shoot it through the back wall.
“Regarding suicide I just don’t have sad emotions,” says Jacob, the occasional narrator of The Treasurer, Max Posner’s deeply felt, sharply observed play about dementia and care-giving. Jacob (a no-nonsense, resentful Peter Friedman) is the hard-as-nails son who, along with Allen and Jeremy, the more accommodating brothers, must take care of his widowed mother, Ida (Deanna Dunagin, who charts a painfully realistic physical and mental decline). By the play’s end, Jacob is as sad as can be.
Inspired by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, Boomerang Theatre Company’s Loveless Texas is a toe-tapping musical comedy set during the early years of the Great Depression. Although many of the characters hold the same names as in the Shakespeare play, the story begins with a twist: Berowne Loveless Navarre (the hugely talented Joe Joseph) and his buddies—Duke Dumaine (Colin Barkell) and Bubba Longaville (Brett Benowitz)—are playboys who travel from New York to Paris. Along the way they do all the things that upstanding young men shouldn’t be doing: chase women, drink liquor and spend the Navarre family money.
In a Little Room, a delightful new black comedy by Pete McElligott, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Ten Bones Theatre Company, shows obvious influences of of Albee, Sartre and especially Beckett, but McElligott has his own voice. The play focuses on two primary characters, Manning (Jeb Kreager) and Charlie (Luis-Daniel Morales), who meet in a hospital waiting room on a very bad day. Initially, they try to conduct a whispered conversation to avoid waking another occupant, who is sleeping (David Triacca, who undertakes multiple roles), and then manage to wake him anyway with amusing ineptitude.
It’s always an adventure sitting down to watch Shakespeare. Where will this production send its viewers? To what time period or country? Will it be set in a fast-food restaurant or trying to stay as close to a traditional production as possible? The Dzieci Theatre company has taken a risk with its recent production of Makbet, a gypsy-infused performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Matt Mitler. The play is presented in a shipping container in the back of a junkyard in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Although it is an uncomfortable place to ask audience members to sit, the underlit and claustrophobic quarters alert the audience immediately to the darkness of the play.
Poor J.M. Barrie hasn’t had an easy time of it in the 21st century, with the notable exception of revivals of one-acts at the Mint Theater. The 2015 musical Finding Neverland, based on a film, focused on the dramatist’s struggle to find success after failure and the triumphant creation of Peter Pan, his classic 1904 play about the boy who won’t grow up—a play that, by the way, most of Finding Neverland’s audience had probably never seen, since nobody actually stages it. It’s known primarily through the musicalized version from the 1950s that starred Mary Martin, although the Royal National Theatre’s 1997 production, with Peter played by Daniel Evans, now artistic director of the Chichester Festival, and Ian McKellen as Captain Hook, showed the original is still a viable and glorious work.
“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.” So says Danish writer Karen Blixen, better known by her pseudonym Isak Dinesen, in her collection of short stories Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny. There is willful ambition in these words, a desire to live out the hunger at the heart of the artist. The Baroness, subtitled Isak Dinesen’s Final Affair, is a Scandinavian American Theater Company production written by Danish playwright Thor Bjørn Krebs, and the play cannot escape its famous protagonist’s obsession with her art. Directed by Henning Hegland, the play opens with Thorkild Bjørnvig (Conrad Ardelius) addressing the audience as the voice of Karen Blixen (Dee Pelletier) plays over him.
Theatergoers who blenched at the subject matter of Edward Albee’s 2002 play The Goat; or, Who Is Silvia? will have a slightly easier time if they attend Inanimate, Nick Robideau’s play that opens the Flea’s new home on Thomas Street in Tribeca—but not by much. Robideau's subject matter parallels that of Albee, who wrote about a man in love with a goat. While Albee’s play is grounded in naturalism—the outlandishness of the premise contrasts with the upheaval of an otherwise normal family life—Robideau takes a different and less successful tack, embracing absurdism for a sexual disorder that is already at the fringes of credibility.
There may be no better, or more controversial, example of humankind’s uneasy attempts to shape nature than the cow. When celeb geek Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted that cows are “biological machine(s) invented by humans to turn grass into steak,” avowed vegan Moby took to Instagram to call him an “ignorant sociopath” for making light of the “unspeakable suffering” humans wreak on billions of animals a year. Irish company Fishamble’s genial Charolais at 59E59 mines this same tension for dark humor and pathos, but with a much more intimate beef, between an Irish woman and a French heifer over the man who loves them both.
Theater for the New City's eighth Dream Up Festival is running through Sept. 17 and features 23 shows, including four fully staged musicals, four shows on LGBTQ themes, five solo shows, a clown show, two with themes of race in America, and one based on visual art. There is also a play in English from Iceland. The festival performances are staggered over three weeks, and the number of performances varies. The complete lineup may be found at jsnyc.com/season/dreamup2017.htm#lineup. Among the highlights is Buskers: The Musical by Mark Tjarks, highlighting stories of New York buskers; Finishing the Suit by Lawrence Aronovitch, a memory play about a tailor who mourns the loss of the two most important people in his life: his lover Jimmy and his most famous client, the Duke of Windsor; and The Woman Illusion by Piper Rasmussen, a solo play about the gallery of ways to be a woman, with settings ranging from a tense job interview to the battlefields of Queen Elizabeth I.
The Mint Theater is continuing its commitment to neglected works this summer with The Suitcase Under the Bed, a collection of four one-act plays written by little-known Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. The female playwright, whose work was produced by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre in the 1930s, has been a continued focus for the Mint since the theater company began its Teresa Deevy Project in 2009.
