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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the tiny stage of Irish Rep’s basement Studio Theatre, two women sit at a cafe table catching up on their lives. The Approach has a cast of three, and the pairing of women changes for each scene. This Dublin-set play centered solely on women talking with one another is written and directed by men (Mark O’Rowe and Conor Bagley, respectively)—and, alas, for a good portion of its 70-minute run time, it fails the Bechdel test.
Jeena Yi’s Jesa is both familiar and fresh. The play revolves around a family reunion where secrets, resentments and accusations are aired—that classic motif in American drama. But Yi combines it with something rarely seen on U.S. stages: an immersion in Korean cultural traditions.
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.
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.
The same week Haiti was represented in Winter Olympics competition for only the second time in history, WP Theater made its contribution to Haitian pride with the world premiere of The Waterfall, a Haitian American family drama written by Phanésia Pharel, the daughter of Haitian immigrants.
In his solo show Ai Yah Goy Vey!, Richard Chang celebrates multicultural New York through the fictional tale of a Chinese man’s borough-hopping search for the father he has never met. But his picaresque is peppered with questionable jokes and portrayals, and, despite an impressive array of costumes, props and video backdrops, the production has an amateurish air to it.
With Data, playwright Matthew Libby has crafted both a techno-thriller and an indictment of Big Tech, in all its mercenariness and disregard for personal privacy and security. Whereas tech-themed dramas typically portray futuristic scenarios, Data’s story of a Silicon Valley company aiding in a federal immigration crackdown seems ripped from this week’s headlines.
The Disappear feels like an incomplete puzzle: Its pieces don’t fit together. This new play, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, is overloaded with undercooked melodramatics and ideas.
Playwright Jennifer Blackmer takes great pains to jazz up a history lesson in Predictor, her tribute to the unheralded woman who created the home pregnancy test, Meg Crane. The chronological account of Crane’s invention is interspersed with musical and joky skits, as well as scenes representing Crane’s thoughts or flashbacks in her life.
In this theatrical age of digital scenery, hybrid storytelling and contemporary subject matter, Reunions seems old-fashioned with its painted backdrop for scenery and simply told stories set in pre–World War I Europe. Yet from this old-fashioned presentation come many of the show’s pleasures, including some charming ditties, fine period costumes and note-perfect performances, particularly by a couple of beloved old hands of the New York stage.
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.
“You don’t need to be better. I like how you are.” In a story about a trans child, this line is something one might hear from the parents of that child, as they learn to adjust and accept. But in Caroline, trans playwright Preston Max Allen defies expectations for a story about a trans child. It is the trans child in Caroline who speaks this line to her mother, an eight-years-sober alcoholic talking about her recovery.
The 30–40 guests attending each performance of Last Call, A Play with Cocktails know they’re going to immersive theater, but they may not expect that what they’ll be immersed in are marriage counseling and an authoritarian dystopia.
This Is Not a Drill is York Theatre’s second production in a year built on a people-stuck-in-a-hotel template. Last December’s Welcome to the Big Dipper involved a blizzard; in Drill, guests of Honolulu’s Hibiscus Resort have their trips disrupted by an emergency alert about an inbound missile.
Just like that other Alexander currently celebrated on the New York stage, fashion designer Alexander McQueen rose from humble origins to make his mark in an elite milieu. Darrah Cloud’s new bio-play House of McQueen features Bridgerton heartthrob Luke Newton in the title role, with Broadway musical star Emily Skinner as McQueen’s mother, Joyce, and Catherine LeFrere as his friend and patron Isabella Blow—the two most important women in McQueen’s life.
Playwright Rishi Varma was motivated to write Sulfur Bottom by his concern for environmental justice, defined by the show’s partner organization WE ACT as “ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.”
Carl Holder’s new show is called Out of Order because, while it has all the usual components of a play—not only plot components like “inciting incident” and “rising action” but production components such as the curtain call, a talkback, even a content warning—they don’t occur in their usual order.
