John Krasinski first made a splash on the TV series The Office (2005–13), and after that with the creepy horror film A Quiet Place (2018) and its goosebump-laden sequels. He has a long film resume as actor, writer and director, and lately he has boosted his credits as an action star in the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan. Yet, although Krasinski appeared in the play Dry Powder with Hank Azaria and Claire Danes in 2017, film acting doesn’t necessarily point toward stage prowess. But the confidence with which Krasinski takes the stage in the first moments of Angry Alan gives one hope that he’s an exception, and it only increases as the actor’s masterly performance opens Studio Seaview (formerly 2nd Stage) with a bang.
In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.
Kelundra Smith’s The Wash is an inspiring play about the originators of the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881, a little-known chapter in American labor history. Making its New York premiere, Smith’s drama captures the black strikers’ struggles during the Jim Crow era in the post–Civil War American South, including public indifference to the women’s working conditions and the demeaning, hateful attitude of their white customers toward them.
Lunar Eclipse, Donald Margulies’s 2023 play now receiving a Second Stage Theater production (at Signature Center), opens with one of the two characters, George, sobbing alone. George is a farmer in his 70s, sitting in darkness in a field in western Kentucky, where he is soon joined by his wife, Em, to watch a lunar eclipse. George and Em will not simply observe the overnight event: they will overcome George’s gruff exterior and look back over the course of their life together, facing difficult subjects, including the death of a child, and ultimately reaffirming their connection.
Encountering adaptations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seems as inevitable as Orpheus’s fateful turning around to look toward Eurydice on their journey out of Hades. Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, from 2003, is receiving a revival to conclude her Signature Theatre residency. The production is directed by Les Waters, who also helmed the play at Yale in 2006 and at Second Stage in 2007. Ruhl’s mournful and whimsical take emphasizes Eurydice’s life and point of view, hence the title excising “Orpheus and,” even bestowing its heroine with some agency, especially during that oh-so-famous moment of Orpheus looking back.
Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole is a fanciful fever dream of the final taping of The Nat King Cole Show on NBC in December of 1957. This musical hits some high notes with Dulé Hill and Daniel J. Watts’ excellent acting but is hamstrung by a disjointed book by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, who also directs.
Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.
