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.
The fun thing about writing a fantasy set in the future or in some alternate universe is, of course, you get to make up your own rules. Garret Jon Groenveld’s The Hummingbirds, a dystopian fantasy set in a future of indeterminate distance, has been kicking around for a decade or so, but it is currently making its New York debut at the Chain Theatre. Groenveld depicts a highly regulated society, yet a violent and anarchic one, and it’s debatable whether we’ve moved closer to such an environment since he wrote it. But no question, the man has imagination, and his vision is efficiently presented in a well-staged, well-acted little production.
Potomac Theatre Project’s Sex, Grift and Death, an evening of one-acts by British playwrights Steven Berkoff and Caryl Churchill, captures the brutal nature of sex, financial survival, death, and illness. The lively cast uses a mixture of British and American accents that work for the sensibility of each piece.
Potomac Theater Project (PTP) has assembled an evening of political theater, presenting three short plays by the Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel, who went on to become the country’s president, and bookending them with shorts by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. The five plays together are given the title Havel: The Passion of Thought, and are all directed by PTP founder and coartistic director Richard Romagnoli.
In what has become a rite of summer in New York, the Potomac Theatre Project (PTP) has taken up residence at the Atlantic Stage 2. The company’s first offering is a double bill featuring Howard Barker’s The Possibilities, directed by Richard Ramagnoli, and Caryl Churchill’s The After-Dinner Joke, directed by Cheryl Faraone. Although stylistically quite different, the plays generally fit together well in their emotionally dizzying and intellectually disorienting exploration of power and politics.
Howard Barker’s Pity in History is a deeply thought-provoking play, which uses the events of the 17th-century English Civil War (a fight to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with a parliamentary government) but is set in contemporary times, to explore the meaning of life, death and relationships. Barker wrote the play in 1984 for BBC television, and its antiwar attitude is clear. It opens on a British platoon that comes to represent any thuggish mass that makes up a military unit. It’s easy to imagine this very same platoon in the Falklands, Afghanistan, or Iraq. After all, war is war, and all war is hell.
