Summer means free theater in New York, and Molière in the Park, an organization co-founded by Lucie Tiberghien and Garth Belcon. The Miser becomes the third free production at LeFrak Center, following The Misanthrope (2022) and Tartuffe (2023). Directed by Tiberghien, it’s an invigorating new version of the French playwright’s 1668 satire.
Boundaries of all types are tested in Ronnie Larsen’s comedic and big-hearted family chronicle, The Actors. The line between Democrat and Republican is pulled taut, as is the division between atheist and religious believer. But those are relatively minor concerns for the playwright. More to the point are the boundaries of grief and how to break through them, the borders of what constitutes a family, and what limits stage actors might burst through when their roles take over their lives. As farcical as it is melancholy, there are as many surprise door knocks in the play’s two acts and two hours as there are woeful revelations.
Near the end of the Barry Manilow musical Harmony, the surviving Comedian Harmonist Ari Leschnikoff, “a Bulgarian singing waiter” who survived the Holocaust to return to his home country, brags to a rabbi: “We saved them, Rabbi! Every Jewish person in Bulgaria! We wouldn’t let them have them! Not one!” This startling declaration, which demanded elaboration, is the foundation of The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria. The story of Boris III might have remained a historical footnote but for Sasha Wilson, the cowriter of the piece (with Joseph Cullen), whose grandparents escaped Bulgaria during World War II. It turns out that the history of Bulgaria in the 20th century is far more complicated than the Harmony passage suggests.
An underlying anxiety is on display in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal about the appeal of his absurdist play: exhibit A is a character listed as Audience Member in the program (Stephanie Berry), who interrupts the proceedings about 30 minutes into the show to offer a detailed explanation of why she is not pleased:
Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there? I’d happily watch a play about that—if it was different.
Take a stand! Inspire action! Touch our hearts—or at least you should try!
We’ve given this gift to you of our evening—one of our precious few nights on this earth—and you’re showing us this?????
Ben Target’s solo show Lorenzo is an end-of-life comedy that is both joyful and surprising. Written and performed by Target (pronounced Tar-ZHAY), and directed by Adam Brace and Lee Griffiths, it is an autobiographical 65 minutes that focuses on a time when Target gave up his work as a comedian to become a live-in caretaker for an aging family friend, “Uncle” Lorenzo Wong.
Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.
