As a portrait of two relationships imploding when the couples are confined together, Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning provides 90 minutes of fiercely acted, propulsive drama. As a portrait of AI’s expanding influence in our lives, however, it underwhelms.
Life for blacks in the antebellum South, during the Civil War, and for generations thereafter consisted of a confluence of injustices at the intersection of class, race, and gender. Todrick Hall's complex new musical Midnight grapples with those injustices by reimagining what it might be like if the oppressors became the oppressed.
The producers of Copperfield! have added the subtitle The New Musical, presumably to alert anyone who saw the notorious 1981 flop Copperfield, which ran only 39 performances, that this show is not a revival of that one, which New York Times critic Frank Rich described as “the kind of musical that sends you out of the theater humming every score other than the one you’ve just heard.” On the contrary, the new Copperfield! is an energetic and melodious delight. If Dickens at Christmastime is a tradition, and A Christmas Carol is starting to feel shopworn, Copperfield! is an ideal substitute.
In Degenerates, playwright Else Went explores the world of incels—typically heterosexual males who cannot form romantic or sexual relationships with women for a variety of reasons. Went’s script immerses the audience in incel and online slang, such as redpill (the belief in an alleged truth about women and the sexual marketplace) and weeb (a fan of Japanese popular culture, particularly anime) as it focuses on some of them, frustrated by loneliness and desiring unconditional love. The incels’ world turns out to be riveting theater.
Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, a landmark of the Theatre of the Absurd, transforms the banalities of everyday conversation into a riotous comedy of linguistic confusion and human folly. Under Bradford Cover’s astute direction, the Resident Acting Company brings out the enduring brilliance of this classic, whose absurdist humor continues to resonate in a world where communication too often gives way to cacophony.
Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, a landmark of the Theatre of the Absurd, transforms the banalities of everyday conversation into a riotous comedy of linguistic confusion and human folly. Under Bradford Cover’s astute direction, the Resident Acting Company brings out the enduring brilliance of this classic, whose absurdist humor continues to resonate in a world where communication too often gives way to cacophony.
Fish, written by Melis Aker and directed by Tatiana Pandiani, is a darkly comic coming-of-age drama inspired by true events about a teenage girl whose search for her missing brother takes a disturbing turn. Set in London in 2016, the play follows 17-year-old Karya as she tests her Turkish mother’s increasingly plausible theory about her brother’s disappearance by launching an online experiment with her best friend, only to discover that some games carry sinister consequences.
Avant-garde playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909–94) traced his love of theater to watching a Punch-and-Judy show in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens as a child. He was enthralled by the puppets that “talked, moved, clubbed each other,” and the performances represented, he wrote, “the spectacle of the world itself . . . as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth.” Igor Golyak’s Delirium, an adaptation of Ionesco’s 1962 play Délire à deux (Frenzy for Two), captures this signature blend of slapstick domestic squabbling while highlighting the human penchant for destruction and barbarity.
In The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God), Katie Cappiello reimagines the Virgin Mary’s origin story to examine the struggle over women’s bodies, reproduction, and who controls the narrative. Written and directed by Cappiello, this comedy brings together three women named Mary whose lives, separated by centuries, illuminate the forces of patriarchal control, violence, and repression.
Molière’s Don Juan takes audiences on a feverish journey from seduction to reckoning, blending farce, tragedy, and the supernatural in a provocative examination of hypocrisy, morality, and the consequences of unchecked desire. In the free outdoor production by Molière in the Park (MIP), this darkly comic masterpiece proves as entertaining as it is unsettling, holding up a mirror to human folly while leaving audiences to determine where they stand.
Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).
Although the renowned 20th-century poet W. H. Auden dismissed The Taming of the Shrew as “the only play of Shakespeare’s that is a complete failure,” Laura Lapidus proves there is still plenty of life in the old comedy with To Have and To Hold, her contemporary reimagining that explores sisterhood, romantic love and the difficult business of coming into one’s own. Smartly directed by Zoë Adams and featuring a top-notch ensemble, this 85-minute romp through modern romance is both deliciously entertaining and unexpectedly poignant.
Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact.
La Femme Theatre Productions, dedicated to “exploring the female experience through classic and contemporary plays,” is presenting the first New York revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter. This largely forgotten play premiered on Broadway in 1997 with a first-rate cast, including the late Lynne Thigpen, who won a Tony Award for her superb performance as the protagonist’s best friend Judith. It closed after a paltry 89 performances. The revival, directed by Sarna Lapine, utilizes post-Broadway revisions by Wasserstein, who died in 2006 at age 55. The script-tinkering hasn’t fixed the problems of the original, and it undermines what Wasserstein accomplished in this not-so-bad high comedy, which, in the late 1990s, was timely and diverting (though it fell far short of the political heft she had intended).
Comedian and stroke survivor Cat Cohen named her solo show Broad Strokes for the puns, but the titular phrase may be more appropriate in another, unintended sense. Cohen tells her story in such broad strokes that, while she succeeds in making her serious medical condition funny, the lack of depth and detail makes it seem not that serious.
What if men suddenly disappeared from the planet? Melissa Maney’s darkly comic Hungry Women, directed by Daniella Caggiano, imaginatively explores that provocative question across two centuries, using absurdism, macabre humor, and a feminist lens to examine how women might reconstruct society—and what they might ultimately discover they are most hungry for.
The pub in Irish dramas is a center not just of drinking, but also of telling tall tales. In J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a new arrival, Christy Mahon, boasts of killing his father. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the regulars exchange ghost stories. But the atmosphere of Catch of the Day, by Megan Jenkins and the Red Fox Theatre company, is different. There’s music already happening on stage when one enters, and the gregarious cast may be engaging the audience in conversation or offering potato chips up and down the aisle or sniping at one another. The slapdash mix of music and comedy is more goulash than ghoulish, yet the lack of structure turns out to be one of the show’s charms.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.
Few things are as ripe for satire as the modern wedding industry, and Catherine Weingarten’s I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! gleefully plunges its horn into the target. This clever world premiere transforms one woman’s engagement anxiety into a satire about desire, denial, and the pressures placed on women to pursue happily-ever-after at any cost.
Send-ups of television series have become a cottage industry in New York theater, but they usually target familiar, long-established properties. Dylan MarcAurele’s Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody arrives barely six months after HBO Max premiered Heated Rivalry, a hit drama about rival hockey players who become lovers. Under Alan Kliffer’s direction, the result is fresh and bawdy, and sung with serious voices by a talented cast, all of whom help with scene changes that boost the production’s sketch-comedy vibe.
Hannah Caplan’s This Is Not About Me, a play about creating art, demonstrates the best aspects of collaboration: a smart script, captivating direction, immersive set design, and wonderful performances. Caplan’s dialogue crackles with wit and insight, while director Douglas Clarke-Wood allows the play’s 20-plus scenes and multiple storylines to flow beautifully. The result is a production that is joyful, funny, and a delight for both the ear and the eye.
Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
The engaging Trash embellishes a common New York story of two roommates in conflict by adding an important twist, as well as a variety of theatrical tricks, including audience participation. The Deaf creators and lead performers, James Caverly and Andrew Morrill, hold out occasional lifelines to a hearing audience via projections, a talking jukebox, and a character who isn’t Deaf, but just as often they speak in American Sign Language (ASL). Lest anyone balk at that, a good deal of the ASL portions are no more challenging than interpreting gestures in a silent film.
Calf Scramble, the title of Libby Carr’s dynamic new work, is a double entendre. On one hand, it is an event, familiar to many a rodeo goer, that features teens chasing and roping calves to take home and raise as potentially profitable livestock. On the other hand, it is a fitting description of the play’s intent. Five high school girls find themselves as penned in by their circumstances as the calves are by their metal fences. The animalism of humans becomes jumbled with the humanity of animals, and if, at times, Carr lays on the symbolism with a heavy hoof, one must remember that the play is set in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the metaphors.
