“A sad tale’s best for winter,” says Mamillius, the young son of Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicilia, in Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1610). Mamillius may be right, but a sad tale can also work on a sweltering night in Central Park, as Daniel Sullivan’s no-frills, emotionally intense staging demonstrates.
In John Donnelly’s The Pass, directed by Max Hunter, two rising British soccer stars confront the volatile intersection of masculinity, desire, and celebrity when a hotel-room encounter threatens to upend their carefully constructed futures. Spanning 12 years and three hotel rooms, this provocative drama tackles the high stakes of being young, ambitious, and closeted in a world where the pressure to perform extends far beyond the playing field.
Well, I’ll Let You Go, Bubba Weiler’s drama of grief and Midwestern angst, opened Off-Broadway a year ago this month, elevating the author from yeoman actor to New York’s most prominent emerging playwright. The Saviors, Weiler’s second play (now at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater) substantiates his promise, extending and arguably deepening his collaboration with director Jack Serio.
“A combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.” “Upside-down pineapple. Honeycomb spaceship/shawarma.” These descriptions of Vessel, the tourist attraction in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, are the most memorable lines in Brendan George’s well-intentioned play The Vessel, which has a lot to say but doesn’t say most of it in a theatrically exciting manner.
Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.
Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water, like the dramatist himself, is charming and effervescent. Also like Haddad, it’s slender (though that word has different connotations when applied to the human form and to an Off-Broadway play).
