At the outset of Ife Olujobi’s Jordans, a surreal comic-horror satire of racial capitalism and its effects on Black bodies, Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), a Black receptionist at a fashionable event space/production facility, essentially builds the stylish, gleaming set (designed by Matt Saunders). This activity is one of many moments in director Whitney White’s sleek production when Jordan’s unceasing labor in the face of disregard or outright hostility from her all-white co-workers is highlighted. Later, when Jordan’s colleague Emma (Brontë England-Nelson) says in a presentation to their wicked boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), that the women at the firm are “slaving away,” she explicitly does not include Jordan in her statement.
The title of Lia Romeo’s play Still, it must be clarified, is unrelated to manufacturing moonshine in the mountains of Appalachia. Rather, her wistful two-hander is about seniors reconnecting—the kind of story that pops up periodically in bridal pages about two spouses whose longtime partners have died and who have somehow reconnected with their youthful heartthrobs. The stories carry an inherent charm, one that is aided immeasurably by two superb performers, Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly.
In addition to introducing the word robot to the English language, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi drama R.U.R. depicted a dystopian world in which scientifically manufactured laborers gradually eradicate humans. The play perfectly captured the anxieties of the burgeoning Machine Age and was a big hit on Broadway in 1922. S. Asher Gelman’s Scarlett Dreams attempts to tap into similar uneasiness as the former Information Age settles into the current Age of Intelligence. With the meteoric advancement and sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), the play suggests that it may be just a matter of time when people will be controlled by digital avatars, and the difference between reality and virtual reality (VR) will become purely conjectural.
Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in the 1960s by Irish playwright Brian Friel, poignantly captures the anticipation, fear, and excitement of emigrating to a new place. Set on the eve of departure, Friel’s play focuses on Gar, the would-be émigré, in both his Public self (played with subdued melancholy by David McElwee) as he struggles with his decision to leave, and his Private self (played with exuberance by A.J. Shively), screaming to get out. It’s deadly boring in Ballybeg, a tiny little corner of County Donegal, Ireland, where the most exciting things are a game of checkers and memories of teenage shenanigans.
Theatergoers yearning to see a new spin on Macbeth need look no further than Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing). Written and directed by Harris, it is a feminist version of Shakespeare’s original that puts Lady Macbeth at its center. But while Harris succeeds in expanding Lady Macbeth’s presence in the story, ultimately the playwright is defeated in increasing the character’s agency, given Shakespeare’s clear-cut trajectory of the doomed Queen.
Opportunities to see the British actress Juliet Stevenson on this side of the Atlantic are too rare to pass up. Robert Icke’s play The Doctor—Stevenson has the title role in this loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi—is a welcome reminder of this actress’s enormous talent. It’s unmissable for any theater lover.
“If a work is quite perfect,” wrote W.H. Auden about Hamlet, “it arouses less controversy and there is less to say about it.” Across four centuries, critics have found plenty to discuss in this longest of Shakespeare’s plays (also one of his most frequently performed). Auden is prominent among those viewing it as severely flawed. Director Robert Icke has joined the colloquy with an absorbing stage production, now at the Park Avenue Armory, that handles the script’s ostensible defects with aplomb and, in so doing, refutes T.S. Eliot’s suggestion that Hamlet is an “artistic failure.”
