It’s 1987 and the Cold War is in the air at Roll-a-Rama in Syracuse, N.Y. Ten-year-old Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) lives above the family business with her former Black Panther father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), and grandmother Puddin (Lizan Mitchell). When she’s not shoveling snow in exchange for candy, Meek is occupied with stocking her fallout shelter and singing in a Cold War–themed children’s choir, the Seedlings of Peace, much to her father’s chagrin. This is the world of Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice. What’s exciting about this play is that it feels sui generis: it’s part farce, part family drama, part surreal global-political meditation, and part musical.
Dust of Egypt: The Story of Sojourner Truth dramatizes a little-known chapter in the famed abolitionist’s life when, as a young mother, she fought to rescue her 5-year-old son after he was illegally sold down South. Karin Abarbanel’s play turns this legal battle—the first time a Black woman successfully sued a white slave owner—into a stirring portrait of maternal courage and moral defiance.
Many elements of Michael Shaw Fisher’s comedy The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits remind one of other works that use the familiar trope of a childless couple, unable to conceive, going to extreme lengths to become parents. Here, the factors that decide the deal are typical of the darker riff on the Golden Rule—i.e., “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” In Fisher’s 75-minute show at the Fringe Encore Series, fanciful variations on the trope provide enough laughs to forget today’s economic disparities.
Playwright David J. Glass also happens to be a biomedical scientist with an expertise in age-related loss of muscle mass. So it is not a shock that his new work of science fiction, Spare Parts, is concerned with the limitations of growing old. What is more surprising is that the protagonist at the center of these medical proceedings has a plan for creating life that Doctor Frankenstein would envy, along with a thirst for blood motivated by desires in the vein of Count Dracula.
Last fall the Mint Theater revived Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1935), a warning about encroaching fascism—sadly relevant once again. Its current production, Harold Brighouse’s Zack (1920), is less overtly political but offers its own quiet consolation: a romantic-comic parable in which everyday kindness and decency triumph over avarice and cruelty.
Last fall the Mint Theater revived Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1935), a warning about encroaching fascism—sadly relevant once again. Its current production, Harold Brighouse’s Zack (1920), is less overtly political but offers its own quiet consolation: a romantic-comic parable in which everyday kindness and decency triumph over avarice and cruelty.
Becomes a Woman, Betty Smith’s sort-of warmup to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn now premiering at the Mint Theater Company, begins wonderfully. In the sheet music department of a dime store in Brooklyn, circa 1927, 19-year-old Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price)—she shares the name of the heroine of Smith’s beloved novel, though she’s quite different from the Francie in the book—is working as a song plugger, demonstrating the little-known Jerome Kern–Anne Caldwell “Left All Alone Again Blues,” to the accompaniment of piano-playing pal Florry (Pearl Rhein), while friend/co-worker/roommate Tessie (Gina Daniels) looks on. A lively setting, a swell Kern tune, a trio of sassy girlfriends gabbing about men. A first of three acts that promises a friendly nostalgia trip, in the vein of Smith’s much more famous book. Where are we headed?
