Randall Sharp has been writing and directing plays for her Axis Theatre Company for more than 30 years. Radiating from the basement of One Sheridan Square, the sacred and profane locale that once housed Café Society, then Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Sharp’s jabby storytelling is never without its quirks. Her latest work, a space oddity called Specimen, is no exception.
The closing of Bad Cinderella in June 2023 may have ended Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 43-year Broadway streak, but it sparked a radical re-interpretation of his hit shows from the 1980s and ’90s. Last season featured a stripped-down, video-heavy revival of Sunset Boulevard, while a ballroom-inspired Cats: The Jellicle Ball is currently running. Next season, Jamie Lloyd’s pulsing, monochromatic revival of Evita, having triumphed in London, arrives in New York. However, the most transformative reimagining has arrived with Masquerade, an immersive and interactive Off-Broadway production that deconstructs and reconfigures The Phantom of the Opera.
Some plays tell stories; 73 Seconds excavates silences. In this haunting and ambitious solo work, writer and performer Jared Mezzocchi traces his mother Rosemary’s hidden connection to NASA to explore the fragile constellations of family memory, loss, and unrealized possibility. Sensitively staged by director Aya Ogawa inside the 64-seat planetarium at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, Mezzocchi’s autobiographical narrative is structured in three movements.
Adam Bock’s The Receptionist is a slippery workplace comedy that starts with a seemingly innocuous monologue by an unidentified male about his love of fishing, and then shifts to the workers in an office, where a Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer, the monologuist) is unexpectedly late. Amid exchanges of personal gossip, the receptionist Beverly (Katie Finneran) and a supervisor, Lorraine (Mallori Johnson), receive a visitor from the “home office,” Martin Dart (Will Pullen), as they await Mr. Raymond’s return. Director Sarah Benson’s revival of Bock’s masterly piece sustains a sense of inconsequentiality, even as discordant notes pop up, until the play reveals itself as a chilling paradigm of what Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, called “the banality of evil.”
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).
