“A combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.” “Upside-down pineapple. Honeycomb spaceship/shawarma.” These descriptions of Vessel, the tourist attraction in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, are the most memorable lines in Brendan George’s well-intentioned play The Vessel, which has a lot to say but doesn’t say most of it in a theatrically exciting manner.
Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.
Comedian and stroke survivor Cat Cohen named her solo show Broad Strokes for the puns, but the titular phrase may be more appropriate in another, unintended sense. Cohen tells her story in such broad strokes that, while she succeeds in making her serious medical condition funny, the lack of depth and detail makes it seem not that serious.
What if men suddenly disappeared from the planet? Melissa Maney’s darkly comic Hungry Women, directed by Daniella Caggiano, imaginatively explores that provocative question across two centuries, using absurdism, macabre humor, and a feminist lens to examine how women might reconstruct society—and what they might ultimately discover they are most hungry for.
For its third mainstage production under new owners A24, Cherry Lane Theatre brings in a London success—Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander Shifters, directed by Lynette Linton—with some boldface names on its U.S. producing team, including actors Idris Elba and Danai Gurira and rapper Little Simz.
“A combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.” “Upside-down pineapple. Honeycomb spaceship/shawarma.” These descriptions of Vessel, the tourist attraction in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, are the most memorable lines in Brendan George’s well-intentioned play The Vessel, which has a lot to say but doesn’t say most of it in a theatrically exciting manner.
Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.
What if men suddenly disappeared from the planet? Melissa Maney’s darkly comic Hungry Women, directed by Daniella Caggiano, imaginatively explores that provocative question across two centuries, using absurdism, macabre humor, and a feminist lens to examine how women might reconstruct society—and what they might ultimately discover they are most hungry for.
For its third mainstage production under new owners A24, Cherry Lane Theatre brings in a London success—Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander Shifters, directed by Lynette Linton—with some boldface names on its U.S. producing team, including actors Idris Elba and Danai Gurira and rapper Little Simz.
After spending decades bringing history’s greatest composers to vivid theatrical life, Hershey Felder turns his storytelling gifts inward in Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me. The result is an intimate and deeply affecting autobiographical portrait that reveals how music shaped not only an extraordinary career but also an extraordinary life.
Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World! explores gender identity, drag, and gay love in a dialogue-heavy production that opens on a bare stage reminiscent of a 1970s avant-garde drama. Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg exchange overripe melodramatic dialogue while moving and posing in tandem, using gestures that recall the 19th-century Delsarte system—back of hand to forehead, arms outstretched—executed with the measured precision of tai chi. The result is alternately intriguing and irritating, but emotionally remote.
Family entertainment often settles for amusing the children while asking adults to patiently endure the ride. The Listies: Make Some Noise gleefully defies that formula, delivering an hour of quick-witted comic anarchy in which playwright-performers Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly prove that silliness, when executed with razor-sharp timing and imagination, can delight audiences from preschoolers to grandparents.
The ideals and experiences that bond people together when they are young may be the very things that divide them when they mature. This we learn from the protagonists in Birthright, Jonathan Spector’s play that tracks the lives of six Jewish friends from 2006 through 2024. In each of the three nearly one-hour acts, perceptible changes occur in each character’s priorities and attitudes, at least in part because in their discussions, no topic is sacrosanct.
Erica Murray’s The Loved Ones is a poignant meditation on grief and betrayal that offers a potentially melodramatic setup but largely avoids obvious broad strokes in favor of quieter pleasures—sharply observed dialogue, characters who defy the labels placed on them, and an exploration of the difficulties and power of empathy. An outstanding ensemble led by the great Maryann Plunkett depicts the international group of women—Irish, English, and American—brought together in rural West Clare, Ireland, through tragic circumstances that threaten to divide them yet end up eliciting a precarious and precious sense of solidarity.
A tent creates a confined yet evocative space—the image might conjure up strong memories and associations, perhaps of childhood camping trips or adolescent backyard adventures or later-in-life attempts at experiencing the great outdoors. For Ari and Brit, the protagonists of Victoria Lynne Barclay’s new two-hander Camping, the tent is a world unto itself. From ages 15 to 40, the two women navigate life—including relationships with inadequate men—and feelings for each other that they can never quite come to terms with, through events that always return them to the same tent. That Barclay makes this contrivance feel largely natural is one of the strengths of this sensitively observed play.
Millie, the cheeky British teenage expatriate at the center of Youth in Flames, begins the play drifting contentedly through life. In playwright-performer Mimi Martin’s engaging and deeply affecting solo drama, directed by Jessica Wiley, that carefree detachment is challenged by the turmoil of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, leading to a journey of self-discovery and moral reckoning.
Eric Bentley’s 1972 play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been revisits the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigation into Communist influence in the entertainment industry during the mid-20th century. The dialogue is drawn directly from the hearing’s transcripts, making this revival as much a documentary as a drama. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro, the production captures the grind of a political investigation in all its tedious forms.
The pub in Irish dramas is a center not just of drinking, but also of telling tall tales. In J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a new arrival, Christy Mahon, boasts of killing his father. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the regulars exchange ghost stories. But the atmosphere of Catch of the Day, by Megan Jenkins and the Red Fox Theatre company, is different. There’s music already happening on stage when one enters, and the gregarious cast may be engaging the audience in conversation or offering potato chips up and down the aisle or sniping at one another. The slapdash mix of music and comedy is more goulash than ghoulish, yet the lack of structure turns out to be one of the show’s charms.
At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.
Angsty-girl plays have been flourishing on New York stages, and in several of these ensemble dramas, the characters use music to let out their frustrations—see, for example, the group dance breaks in John Proctor Is the Villain, All Nighter and the just-extendedDad Don’t Read This. For the title characters of Eisa Davis’ disarming ||:Girls:|| ||:Chance:|| ||:Music:||, though, music represents more than a release. It’s their way of communicating, of making sense of their world, of discovering just what they’re capable of and what (and who) they truly care about.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.
Abigail Pickard Price’s production of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield may not include all the great characters of the 800-plus pages of the novel, but her exciting adaptation (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) for the Guildford Shakespeare Company is not to be missed.
Eljon Wardally’s Blooming in Dry Season turns a family dispute over a daughter’s future into a moving examination of ambition, sacrifice, and the burdens parents pass to their children. Over the course of two acts, layers of conflict gradually emerge, deepening one’s understanding of the characters’ lives. Wardally skillfully builds suspense through subtle clues that reveal the emotional toll hidden beneath the characters’ seemingly happy lives, and director Jackie Alexander paces the production adroitly and guides the powerful performances of an excellent cast.
John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Jerome is a departure from the typical gay play that pops up in June, geared toward Pride month: its focus is older gay men. A chalkboard in front of the proscenium curtain charts the decline of Jerome, Ariz., a mining town, from 10,000 population (crossed out) to lesser numbers (also crossed out) to, finally, Ghost City. That’s a tipoff that this eerie, intriguing drama is going to be different.
Jean Genet’s The Maids remains one of the theater’s strangest and most unsettling explorations of class, identity, fantasy, and performance. In director Kip Williams’s “new version,” Genet’s world of ritualized role-playing is transplanted into the age of Instagram filters, live-streams, and social media influencer culture—a contemporary framework that proves surprisingly well-suited to Genet’s original obsessions.
