Comedy

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Ginger Twinsies

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Ginger Twinsies

Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, itself a reboot of the 1961 film of the same name. Although the parody focuses on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version, both films share a completely ridiculous storyline that allows a child actor to play two characters. So many coincidences and lapses in logic boggle the rational mind. Therefore, Ginger Twinsies, written and directed by Kevin Zak, has carte blanche to unmercifully mock its source material. It is 80 minutes of high-energy hijinks, slapstick, sight gags, wordplay, and enough 1990s trivia to be its own Trivial Pursuit category.

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Polishing Shakespeare

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Polishing Shakespeare

Can one improve upon Shakespeare? That is the question. Or at least that is the question that propels the plot of Brian Dykstra’s Polishing Shakespeare. For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s identity has been debated, challenged, and disputed, and his plays have been revised, reimagined, and rewritten. Yet it is only recently that the literary ethics of directly translating his works from early modern to present-day English have been thoroughly considered.

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Duke & Roya

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Duke & Roya

It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.

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Trophy Boys

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Trophy Boys

In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.

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Lowcountry

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Lowcountry

Abby Rosebrock’s 2018 dark comedy, Dido of Idaho, featured an act of extreme violence carried out with a household object. Her 2019 follow-up, Blue Ridge, focused on addicts trying to form relationships in the midst of a recovery program. Her new work, a twisted tale of good will and bad romance called Lowcountry, utilizes both of these dramatic elements in its exploration of a first date warped by bouts of desperation and deception. In this Atlantic Theater Company production directed by Jo Bonney, some scenes might be over-extended, but the sexual tension simmers, then boils over.

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Prosperous Fools

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Prosperous Fools

Taylor Mac is chronicling slapstick goings-on backstage at a not-for-profit’s fundraising gala in his new comedy Prosperous Fools. Murphy’s Law is in high gear, and things are haywire. Since the not-for-profit is called National Ballet Theater, it’s clear this is Mac’s assessment of the state of the arts under the new federal administration that has made its leader chair of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

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Point Loma

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Point Loma

In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.

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The Imaginary Invalid

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The Imaginary Invalid

The Imaginary Invalid is of interest to historians not just because it is Molière’s last play and not just because Molière himself performed the lead role of Monsieur Argan. It is also due to the fact that, while Argan is a hypochondriac, Molière suffered from dire, real-life ailments that caused him to collapse on stage during just his fourth performance. He died soon afterward. Such dark irony does not haunt his lighthearted comedy, though, and so it has floated, for more than 350 years, from one fizzy reinterpretation to the next. The latest, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and produced by Red Bull Theater, is a loosey-goosey affair. The vibe is French farce à la The Marx Brothers. The company is a puff pastry stuffed with ham. And the story is King Lear, but with enema jokes.

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Bus Stop

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Bus Stop

Bus Stop, the third of four Broadway successes that playwright William Inge scored between 1950 and 1959 (the second, Picnic, won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize), takes place in a small-town diner on a route between Kansas City and Topeka. Grace (Cindy Cheung), the proprietor, keeps the place open all night, when necessary, as a refuge for travelers marooned by inclement weather. During a blizzard, a Topeka-bound bus arrives around 1 a.m.; the driver, Carl (David Shih), informs his four passengers that they’re stranded until highway crews clear the road ahead.

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The Imaginary Invalid

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The Imaginary Invalid

For its seventh season, Molière in the Park (MIP), in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance, is producing Molière’s comedy-ballet The Imaginary Invalid in a fresh new translation by Lucie Tiberghien. Tiberghien, MIP’s founder and artistic director, has cut Molière’s original text to the bone for her streamlined production. One of the cuts is the minor character Louison, Angélique's younger sister, to bring the play to a brisk 100 minutes and focus on the central characters.

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The United States vs Ulysses

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The United States vs Ulysses

Just ahead of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Ireland’s Once Off Productions has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with The United States vs Ulysses, the frisky entertainment now playing at the Irish Arts Center. Written by journalist/dramatist Colin Murphy, the play is intricately researched yet undidactic. Featuring a six-member cast from Ireland directed by Conall Morrison, it’s an imaginative, fresh-mouthed account of one of literary modernism’s most significant legal confrontations.

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We Do the Same Thing Every Week

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We Do the Same Thing Every Week

In Robert Leverett’s We Do the Same Thing Every Week, Dick (Leverett himself) and Jane (Jessica Nesi), the famous elementary schoolbook characters, are visited on a rainy Sunday afternoon by a strange, humanoid Cat (Casey Worthington) that is going to help them have fun—whether they want it or not.

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Five Models in Ruins, 1981

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Five Models in Ruins, 1981

The October 1981 issue of Vogue magazine features Nastassia Kinski on the cover and includes the infamous Richard Avedon two-page photo spread of the actress wearing nothing but a huge, writhing boa constrictor. But in the alternate reality of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s vitriolic new comedy, Five Models in Ruins, 1981, that October issue very nearly comes to feature a much lesser-known cover girl, and the accompanying story would showcase not a serpent, but five decidedly catty women in flowing white gowns.

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Hold Me in the Water

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Hold Me in the Water

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).

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The Last Laugh

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The Last Laugh

Three of Britain’s leading comedians of the 20th century are the focus of Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh, a play that harks back to Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1923) and Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians (1975). As the trio meets in a shabby dressing area of an uncertain venue for some kind of benefit performance, issues of what makes something funny and who steals jokes from whom, along with plenty of comic insults, arise.

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I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan

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I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan

Mona Pirnot’s new play, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, concerns the hardscrabble existence of aspiring playwrights and the passion that keeps them writing for an industry in which, as playwright Robert Anderson ostensibly said, it’s possible to make a killing but never a living. David Greenspan is the very model of a theater artist who has persevered despite dire fiscal odds. Greenspan is pretty well-known Off-Broadway and, especially, Off-Off Broadway, but he’s certainly not a household name.

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Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.

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Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.

English dramatist Caryl Churchill is turning 87 this September. In advance of that landmark, the Public Theater is presenting Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., a quadruple bill of Churchill one-acts new to New York. Like Albee on this side of the Atlantic, Churchill has always had a penchant for depicting humanity in rather abstract terms. Directed by Churchill specialist James Macdonald, these shorts are supplemented with entr’acte circus feats by a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) and an acrobat (Junru Wang). The evening’s fare may seem, at first blush, a random assortment but, upon reflection, common themes emerge.

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The Twenty Sided Tavern

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The Twenty Sided Tavern

The Twenty Sided Tavern, inspired by Hasbro’s tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, isn’t easy to categorize. It’s a combination of comedy, mystery, improv, and puzzle, and at times it looks and sounds like a television game show.

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In Two Minds

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In Two Minds

In Two Minds is a new Irish play about the way a mother and daughter's intimate relationship is tested by mental illness. Playwright Joanne Ryan has constructed a story in which a mother’s behavior, resulting from bipolar disorder, tests her daughter’s resolve, love and support. Daughter (the characters are unnamed) knows she has little control to prevent her mother’s descent into depression, like watching a sinking ship. The play presents two portraits of the bipolar’s emotional toll compassionately but accurately. It is gritty and unflinching.

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Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods

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Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods

With Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams pay homage to their foremothers in downtown queer performance—collaborative troupes like Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers that produced freewheeling entertainments infused with sapphic sensibilities yet typically without any linear story.

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