DR2

Heartbreak Hotel

Heartbreak Hotel

Titling her play Heartbreak Hotel is a major bit of misdirection from New Zealand dramatist Karin McCracken. Elvis’s recording of his classic 1956 single (by Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden) is barely mentioned, and its bouncy blues are a far cry from McCracken’s gloomier deep dive into the nature of heartbreak. Directed by Eleanor Bishop, the play reaches beyond McCracken’s personal drama to examine unexpected, more clinical aspects of a breakup, such as psychological, biological, and physiological symptoms. Interspersed with those sequences are musical interludes—she took up the synthesizer to occupy herself after the end of a six-year relationship, and she has learned six “powerful” chords.

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All the Beauty in the World

All the Beauty in the World

“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”

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Still

Still

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.

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