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.
In Roman Freud’s Beneath the Ice of the Vistula, a Polish-Jewish composer named Adam Kobylanski agonizes over a musical composition that he is sure will be a masterpiece. The year is 1939. The Nazi invasion looms on the horizon but is still far enough away that Adam has the time and space to work on his composition in peace.
Tom Stoppard, whose 1993 comedy Arcadia is being revived by Bedlam, turned 86 last summer and, to the extent discernible from afar, he’s going strong. A year ago Stoppard was in New York for the premiere of Leopoldstadt, an emotionally charged, multigenerational epic. Set in Vienna during the Holocaust, that late-career masterwork proved surprising even for a playwright who’s known to avoid doing anything twice. When it was new, Arcadia was also a surprise. It represents the dramatist in midcareer, his imagination careening among a wild assortment of topics: English landscape gardening, quantum physics, the theory of deterministic chaos, and the peril for researchers of what’s inscrutable in the historical record (as, for example, gaps in the biography of George Gordon, Lord Byron, an important offstage character).
