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.
Nelson Diaz-Marcano wrote Las Borinqueñas to honor Puerto Rican women, like his mother and grandmothers, who work hard, raise children and serve their communities. But his bilingual play’s awkwardly presented fact-based component—concerning the clinical trials for the first birth control pill, which were conducted in Puerto Rico in the 1950s—seems to get in the way of his affectionate personal portrait.
The fun thing about writing a fantasy set in the future or in some alternate universe is, of course, you get to make up your own rules. Garret Jon Groenveld’s The Hummingbirds, a dystopian fantasy set in a future of indeterminate distance, has been kicking around for a decade or so, but it is currently making its New York debut at the Chain Theatre. Groenveld depicts a highly regulated society, yet a violent and anarchic one, and it’s debatable whether we’ve moved closer to such an environment since he wrote it. But no question, the man has imagination, and his vision is efficiently presented in a well-staged, well-acted little production.
Daniel’s Husband is one of those plays where, halfway through, something so unexpected, plot-altering, and tone-shifting happens that it just can’t be revealed. Michael McKeever’s comedy-drama about the still-new era of gay marriage is cleft in two—part one: comedy, part two: drama—and both halves are effective, if you’re willing to accept some questionable behavior on the part of the title character.
Pia Scala-Zankel’s 2014 play Street Children captures a small slice of life for gay and transgender kids on the streets, and features an ensemble of transgender, queer and gender-fluid actors. Set in the late 1980s around the West Side piers on the outskirts of the West Village, sex is currency in their milieu. When Jamie, played skillfully by Eve Lindley, arrives for the first time at the piers, her nose has been bloodied by a trick gone bad. She’s 17 and unschooled in this world yet she has nowhere else to go. Like all the kids who arrive here, she has been rejected by her family and society at large.
