The Disappear feels like an incomplete puzzle: Its pieces don’t fit together. This new play, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, is overloaded with undercooked melodramatics and ideas.
A work that has been collaboratively devised by members of the Happenstance Theater troupe, Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box cites as its influences the artworks of Joseph Cornell and the French films Amélie (2001) and Mon Oncle (1958). The play, directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Selma Mandell, explores randomness and dissimilarity and focuses on the lives of tenants in a French apartment house through a series of scenes that can be identified from their artistic influences or simply enjoyed as charming vignettes arranged in visually striking tableaux. Either way, the result is a multilayered and curious work that is both thought-provoking and delightful.
Bob Marley: How Reggae Changed the World is a soulful solo journey that traces reggae’s roots and its global reverberations through the life and legacy of its most iconic figure. Written, performed, and directed by Duane Forrest, the show blends acoustic music, personal storytelling, and audience connection, allowing one to glimpse how Bob Marley’s message reshaped not only a genre, but lives.
The Holocaust is never light fare for anyone, and it may be presumptuous to say, but its darkness is no more acutely felt than by those who survived it. The Congress for Jewish Culture’s production of Night Stories: Four Tales of Reanimation dramatizes the Yiddish poems of Avrom Sutzkever, widely acknowledged as the most eloquent Holocaust poet. Sutzkever’s poems, which depict the ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, under Nazi occupation, reflect the emotional roller coaster of its residents’ existence, pivoting among horror, humor, and an ambivalent desire for both death and redemption.
Playwright Jennifer Blackmer takes great pains to jazz up a history lesson in Predictor, her tribute to the unheralded woman who created the home pregnancy test, Meg Crane. The chronological account of Crane’s invention is interspersed with musical and joky skits, as well as scenes representing Crane’s thoughts or flashbacks in her life.
Dream Feed, currently at HERE, is a poetic meditation on the theme of dreams. Performed by the two-time Grammy Award–winning theatrical family band the HawtPlates (Jade Hicks, Justin Hicks, and Kenita Miller-Hicks), the production utilizes sound and song to bring subconscious ideas to the surface.
