Edward Karam

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Trash

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Trash

The engaging Trash embellishes a common New York story of two roommates in conflict by adding an important twist, as well as a variety of theatrical tricks, including audience participation. The Deaf creators and lead performers, James Caverly and Andrew Morrill, hold out occasional lifelines to a hearing audience via projections, a talking jukebox, and a character who isn’t Deaf, but just as often they speak in American Sign Language (ASL). Lest anyone balk at that, a good deal of the ASL portions are no more challenging than interpreting gestures in a silent film.

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Our House

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Our House

Barry Boehm’s play Our House deals partly with family strife—a staple of American drama for a century—with the added difference that four of the six characters are gay. A long night of drinking and drug-taking puts it squarely in the vein of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a show in which one of Boehm’s characters happens to be starring, in a community theater production. More particularly, the primarily gay characters echo any number of engaging dramas, from The Boys in the Band to Love! Valour! Compassion! to My Night with Reg.

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An Ideal Husband

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An Ideal Husband

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is a quotation attributed to French novelist Honoré de Balzac, but it applies directly to the plot of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895). Written close to Wilde’s peak—it opened just a month before The Importance of Being Earnest—Husband fizzes with epigrams and uses heightened language to expose hypocrisy. The Storm Theatre is brave to tackle the work, packed both with melodrama and wit, but to succeed, as Sir Peter Hall did with his Broadway production 30 years ago, requires skills and experience that it can’t altogether muster.

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The Bookstore

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The Bookstore

Michael Walek’s The Bookstore is a cozy, unprepossessing play about the power of literature to change one’s life and the importance of both writing and reading. It is also about the people who do one or the other, and those who try to do both, and it’s peppered with nuggets about writers, readers, and the spectrum of human experience.

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The Baker’s Wife

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The Baker’s Wife

The musical The Baker’s Wife has had a notoriously checkered history. With a book by Joseph Stein and music and lyrics by the young Stephen Schwartz, it first appeared in 1976. But, amid casting changes (Patti LuPone survived) and infighting, producer David Merrick closed it before it got to Broadway. Over the years it has had many iterations, in hopes of correcting whatever sank it then (critics excoriated the book but praised the music). LuPone’s song “Meadowlark” has become a standard for cabaret singers. The current revival at the Classic Stage Company (CSC), boasting a stellar cast, is likely to be its best shot at resuscitation.

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Archduke

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Archduke

If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.

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The Wild Duck

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The Wild Duck

Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck received a confused reaction from most critics after it was published in 1884. Almost alone, George Bernard Shaw acclaimed it, and while its reputation has gradually grown, it isn’t performed nearly so much as A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler or Ghosts: the last New York City production in English was in 1987. For a play that the stern critic John Simon called “one of the finest tragicomedies in all dramatic literature,” the neglect is shocking, so Theatre for a New Audience deserves kudos for resurrecting it. The result, however, is often disappointing.

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Duke & Roya

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Duke & Roya

It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.

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Prince Faggot

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Prince Faggot

Jordan Tannahill’s drama Prince Faggot, a love story about a gay heir to the British throne and his boyfriend, is admirably multifaceted: part fantasia, part social and political commentary, part agitprop. At heart, though, Prince Faggot is a bittersweet romance about a royal and a commoner, a sort of Roman Holiday for the 21st century—if Audrey Hepburn’s princess had become a devotee of drug-assisted intercourse and Japanese rope bondage.

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A Special Relationship

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A Special Relationship

In political parlance, the term A Special Relationship refers to the longstanding alliance of America and its “closest ally” Britain (the phrase “America’s oldest ally” refers to France). Disparities in language are a prominent feature in Tim Marriott and Jeff Stolzer’s winsome comedy, which is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. The piece takes as a major theme George Bernard Shaw’s maxim (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde): “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

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Angry Alan

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Angry Alan

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.

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Goddess

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Goddess

The new musical Goddess signals from the get-go that it has Broadway ambitions. Vivid with saturated colors, eye-catching in Arnulfo Maldonado’s underground nightclub, and bursting with energetic dancing and singing, the Public Theater production is a grand assemblage of first-rate talent. And, as in the long-running Hadestown, another show with a subterranean setting, the characters are a mixture of supernatural entities and humans.

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Shellshocked

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Shellshocked

Two-character plays are a tricky thing to pull off. When they are successful, they can be engaging entertainments. Sleuth boasted a great deal of mind games, along with costume changes. In the past season, The Roommate and Dakar 2000 traveled through scene and time changes, but with expectations often upended. Although Philip Stokes’s Shellshocked also relies on mind games, it feels hermetically sealed.

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Outraged Hearts

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Outraged Hearts

In a letter to Jay Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Directions, in late 1945, Tennessee Williams wrote about his process: “All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of tortured going over and over—Battle [of Angels], [The Glass] Menagerie, the few good stories. ... But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.” The bill of two one-acts under the umbrella title Outraged Hearts—early versions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, revived by the Fire Weeds theater company—confirms the messiness Williams alludes to. As ambitious as Fire Weeds’ project is, it yields little beyond the confirmation of Williams’s own words.

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

If the British actress Gertrude Lawrence is remembered at all nowadays, it is primarily for originating the part of Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951). She didn’t get the role in the 1956 film, and her reputation rests on a long theatrical career in Britain and America, as Lucy Stevens’s gossipy Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening, makes clear.

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The Last Laugh

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The Last Laugh

Three of Britain’s leading comedians of the 20th century are the focus of Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh, a play that harks back to Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1923) and Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians (1975). As the trio meets in a shabby dressing area of an uncertain venue for some kind of benefit performance, issues of what makes something funny and who steals jokes from whom, along with plenty of comic insults, arise.

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Grief Camp

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Grief Camp

Eliya Smith has chosen the title of her play Grief Camp cannily. The name nails down the setting and the situation, and it allows her to start the proceedings at a low key, with two of her six young people, Brad and Luna, talking in the dark after lights out. It scarcely matters that the audience can’t yet identify who is who, because the chitchat is innocuous: “Are you awake?” “I’m debating if I want to pee.” “I’m sorry about the stuff at the lake.”

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A Streetcar Named Desire

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A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has one of drama’s greatest female roles—Blanche DuBois, perhaps only rivaled by Shaw’s St. Joan and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s a theatrical mountain that any serious actress would like to scale, and Patsy Ferran deserves credit for doing so, even if the Almeida Theatre production visiting BAM from London comes up short. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar also features the better-known Paul Mescal (of Gladiator II renown) as Stanley Kowalski.

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Grangeville

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Grangeville

Grangeville, the title of Samuel D. Hunter’s new piece is, as in most of his plays—Pocatello, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements (but not The Whale)—the Idaho setting of his latest drama, a two-hander about estranged half-brothers coming together to rehash a lot of anguished family history. If the result is disappointing, it’s because Hunter is working over well-tilled ground. 

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Curse of the Starving Class

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Curse of the Starving Class

In the late 1970s, when playwright Sam Shepard decided to move on from his short experimental works staged at La Mama in the East Village, the Royal Court in London, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, he turned to the American theater’s standby—a dysfunctional family. The result was the three-act Curse of the Starving Class. The disintegrating family would be the focus of True West and Buried Child, perhaps his two most famous works, but the seeds are already sprouting wildly in Curse.

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