As a portrait of two relationships imploding when the couples are confined together, Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning provides 90 minutes of fiercely acted, propulsive drama. As a portrait of AI’s expanding influence in our lives, however, it underwhelms.
Life for blacks in the antebellum South, during the Civil War, and for generations thereafter consisted of a confluence of injustices at the intersection of class, race, and gender. Todrick Hall's complex new musical Midnight grapples with those injustices by reimagining what it might be like if the oppressors became the oppressed.
The producers of Copperfield! have added the subtitle The New Musical, presumably to alert anyone who saw the notorious 1981 flop Copperfield, which ran only 39 performances, that this show is not a revival of that one, which New York Times critic Frank Rich described as “the kind of musical that sends you out of the theater humming every score other than the one you’ve just heard.” On the contrary, the new Copperfield! is an energetic and melodious delight. If Dickens at Christmastime is a tradition, and A Christmas Carol is starting to feel shopworn, Copperfield! is an ideal substitute.
In Degenerates, playwright Else Went explores the world of incels—typically heterosexual males who cannot form romantic or sexual relationships with women for a variety of reasons. Went’s script immerses the audience in incel and online slang, such as redpill (the belief in an alleged truth about women and the sexual marketplace) and weeb (a fan of Japanese popular culture, particularly anime) as it focuses on some of them, frustrated by loneliness and desiring unconditional love. The incels’ world turns out to be riveting theater.
Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, a landmark of the Theatre of the Absurd, transforms the banalities of everyday conversation into a riotous comedy of linguistic confusion and human folly. Under Bradford Cover’s astute direction, the Resident Acting Company brings out the enduring brilliance of this classic, whose absurdist humor continues to resonate in a world where communication too often gives way to cacophony.
Fish, written by Melis Aker and directed by Tatiana Pandiani, is a darkly comic coming-of-age drama inspired by true events about a teenage girl whose search for her missing brother takes a disturbing turn. Set in London in 2016, the play follows 17-year-old Karya as she tests her Turkish mother’s increasingly plausible theory about her brother’s disappearance by launching an online experiment with her best friend, only to discover that some games carry sinister consequences.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.
