It’s 1987 and the Cold War is in the air at Roll-a-Rama in Syracuse, N.Y. Ten-year-old Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) lives above the family business with her former Black Panther father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), and grandmother Puddin (Lizan Mitchell). When she’s not shoveling snow in exchange for candy, Meek is occupied with stocking her fallout shelter and singing in a Cold War–themed children’s choir, the Seedlings of Peace, much to her father’s chagrin. This is the world of Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice. What’s exciting about this play is that it feels sui generis: it’s part farce, part family drama, part surreal global-political meditation, and part musical.
Dust of Egypt: The Story of Sojourner Truth dramatizes a little-known chapter in the famed abolitionist’s life when, as a young mother, she fought to rescue her 5-year-old son after he was illegally sold down South. Karin Abarbanel’s play turns this legal battle—the first time a Black woman successfully sued a white slave owner—into a stirring portrait of maternal courage and moral defiance.
Many elements of Michael Shaw Fisher’s comedy The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits remind one of other works that use the familiar trope of a childless couple, unable to conceive, going to extreme lengths to become parents. Here, the factors that decide the deal are typical of the darker riff on the Golden Rule—i.e., “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” In Fisher’s 75-minute show at the Fringe Encore Series, fanciful variations on the trope provide enough laughs to forget today’s economic disparities.
Playwright David J. Glass also happens to be a biomedical scientist with an expertise in age-related loss of muscle mass. So it is not a shock that his new work of science fiction, Spare Parts, is concerned with the limitations of growing old. What is more surprising is that the protagonist at the center of these medical proceedings has a plan for creating life that Doctor Frankenstein would envy, along with a thirst for blood motivated by desires in the vein of Count Dracula.
Last fall the Mint Theater revived Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1935), a warning about encroaching fascism—sadly relevant once again. Its current production, Harold Brighouse’s Zack (1920), is less overtly political but offers its own quiet consolation: a romantic-comic parable in which everyday kindness and decency triumph over avarice and cruelty.
Four employees of investment bank Friedman Wallace gather for an “affinity group” meeting. Their affinity? They are women of Chinese descent. Yet Alex Lin chose to name her new play Chinese Republicans. Consider it the first sign of dissonance in Lin’s ineffectual script.
Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian’s new music-theater piece, was supposed to open on March 30, 2020. Two weeks before that, New York City’s playhouses closed precipitately in response to Covid-19. On the second anniversary of the aborted premiere, Oratorio has returned. After 24 months of isolation and loss, there’s a miraculous feel to this piece of theater.
