This is pretty high-profile stuff for La MaMa, and a far more elaborate production than their norm: A major stage performer and a noted film actor in a new play by a well-known movie and TV actor. And Then We Were No More, by Tim Blake Nelson, thrusts the audience into a depressing future that may not be far off—but one that feels more familiar, what with the surfeit of apocalyptic and otherwise downbeat futuristic dramas flooding the marketplace, than Nelson likely intended.
The 30–40 guests attending each performance of Last Call, A Play with Cocktails know they’re going to immersive theater, but they may not expect that what they’ll be immersed in are marriage counseling and an authoritarian dystopia.
John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans, now playing at the Public Theater, depicts not a melting pot of cultures, all successfully rising to the top, but rather the isolation and obstacles of the immigrant’s reach for a piece of the American pie.
The Essentialisn’t is the most awkward title of the theater season so far, but never mind that. Eisa Davis’s intimate musical enfolds its spectators in the cultural recollection of the earliest Africans brought to this country and in Davis’s own search for identity through music, acting, and dance. It’s an ambitious undertaking focused on what Davis calls “personal sovereignty.” Davis, who is billed as creator, performer, and director, poses a multivalent question—“Can you be Black and not perform”—which appears in bright fuchsia neon onstage throughout the play.
The new stage musical Saturday Church traces a Black teenager’s search for belonging through the glittering rhythms of ballroom culture and queer self-expression. Based loosely on Damon Cardasis’s 2017 indie film, the musical unites Cardasis and James Ijames’s book with songs from Sia’s catalogue, as well as Honey Dijon’s music.
This is pretty high-profile stuff for La MaMa, and a far more elaborate production than their norm: A major stage performer and a noted film actor in a new play by a well-known movie and TV actor. And Then We Were No More, by Tim Blake Nelson, thrusts the audience into a depressing future that may not be far off—but one that feels more familiar, what with the surfeit of apocalyptic and otherwise downbeat futuristic dramas flooding the marketplace, than Nelson likely intended.
