With Data, playwright Matthew Libby has crafted both a techno-thriller and an indictment of Big Tech, in all its mercenariness and disregard for personal privacy and security. Whereas tech-themed dramas typically portray futuristic scenarios, Data’s story of a Silicon Valley company aiding in a federal immigration crackdown seems ripped from this week’s headlines.
Gatz, the signature creation of downtown theater troupe Elevator Repair Service (ERS), included every sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1924 novel The Great Gatsby, with each performance running a whopping eight hours (including intermissions and dinner break). At the Public Theater these days (16 years after Gatz premiered there), ERS is offering its take on Ulysses, the ravishingly innovative novel—serialized in 1918, published in book form in 1922—that secured James Joyce’s position as preeminent pioneer of stream-of-consciousness narrative in English. As with Gatz, the script of Ulysses consists entirely of the novelist’s original prose; this time, though, there are numerous elisions, permitting each performance to clock in at a mere two hours and 40 minutes.
For nearly 70 years, the songs of Burt Bacharach, one of the most renowned and versatile figures in contemporary music, crossed genres, continents, and cultures. He collaborated with and accompanied the music industry’s finest singers, lyricists, and fellow musicians. Going Bacharach, directed by David Zippel, is a revue of Bacharach’s musical genesis and his many cross-genre innovations.
In Edward, written, performed, and directed by Ed Schmidt, a small box of 27 mundane artifacts becomes a form of domestic archaeology, each item revealing a fragment of a life once lived. Gathered around a table in independent bookstores across New York City, audiences help reconstruct—night by night—a portrait of the late Edward O’Connell, a former high school English teacher whose faith in literature echoes through the stories and the spaces where they are told.
Michael Walek’s The Bookstore is a cozy, unprepossessing play about the power of literature to change one’s life and the importance of both writing and reading. It is also about the people who do one or the other, and those who try to do both, and it’s peppered with nuggets about writers, readers, and the spectrum of human experience.
Molière’s Tartuffe is robustly reimagined by Lucas Hnath in a randy new version directed by Sarah Benson, turning the classic comedy of hypocrisy into a breathless, contemporary satire. With choreography by Raja Feather Kelly and a fearless cast led by Matthew Broderick and David Cross, the production unleashes ferocious wit and gleeful buffoonery.
Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water, like the dramatist himself, is charming and effervescent. Also like Haddad, it’s slender (though that word has different connotations when applied to the human form and to an Off-Broadway play).
