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.
Josh, protagonist of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, is a New York University drama student and veteran blackout drunk. Careless and self-centered, Josh spreads pandemonium wherever he goes. Irksome as this conduct may be for those around him—especially his long-suffering mother (Heidi Armbruster), Josh is an audience charmer. Credit for that goes to Brasch’s wit and an adroit performance by leading-actor Noah Galvin. Yet the achievement of this production owes less to the comic capital of the central character than to the heartfelt depiction of Josh’s grandparents, embodied by four notable veterans of the New York stage: Caroline Aaron, Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, and Chip Zien.
Clare Barron’s 2014 You Got Older is a comedy of many colors. In this revival at the handsomely renovated Cherry Lane Theatre, Freudian fantasy shares the stage with elements of a traditional rom-com, while gross-out jokes demand equal time against moments of heartwarming family humor. But primarily the intermissionless play is a bittersweet buddy comedy, a keenly observed tale of a sick father and the grown daughter who comes home to see him through his illness. Their sporadic bouts of bonding and awkward conversations provide comfort and support, even as their physical bodies and emotional losses betray them.
No one in Aya Ogawa’s Meat Suit ever speaks or explains the title phrase, but based on its use in fantasy literature and a Netflix documentary, it refers to a human body inhabited by a demon or alien. The play’s subtitle, The Shitshow of Motherhood, also conjures a negative impression of motherhood. So, too, does almost everything in the show—and in exhaustingly absurdist fashion. The play may not turn anyone off to motherhood, but it could turn people off to any future theatrical explorations of it.
The Marcel Marceau that most people, or at least most theater aficionados, know was one of the world’s greatest mimes. As Bip, a lovable, quirky, charming clown, he regaled audiences with a worn top hat from which protruded a floppy red flower. Marceau’s vulnerable and self-effacing persona, though, was but a thin veil obscuring his heroism during World War II, as recounted in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s Marcel on the Train.
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.
