Drama

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Everything Is Here

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Everything Is Here

Peggy Stafford’s Everything Is Here explores the later stage of the life cycle—what some call the golden years, and others call the twilight years—by focusing on three women in their 70s: Bev (Jan Leslie Harding), Bonnie (Petronia Paley) and Janice (Mia Katigbak). Living in senior housing, they find their days are punctuated by the visiting nurse, Nikki (Suzannah Millonzi), who has a sadness beneath her cheerful demeanor, and the lanky and handsome Grant (Pete Simpson), who leads meditation and mindfulness classes at the home while he auditions for acting roles.

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Diversion

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Diversion

Playwright Scott Organ excels at creating characters whose mistakes in their jobs and relationships lead to agonizing consequences. His 2020 drama, 17 Minutes, was a harrowing tale of a sheriff’s deputy in a crumbling marriage who failed to stop a mass shooting. For his new work, Diversion, Organ reunites with director Seth Barrish and the Barrow Group to focus on a close-knit nursing unit on the verge of unraveling. This quiet and absorbing think piece examines the hardship of opioid addiction and the post-traumatic stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Surgeon and Her Daughters

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The Surgeon and Her Daughters

Set in New York City—specifically Times Square and Ozone Park, Queens—The Surgeon and Her Daughters presents a powerful story of seemingly unrelated people whose lives are upended as they struggle with insecurity and grief. Chris Gabo’s script artfully follows characters who struggle, deceive, fight, joke, and hope while reckoning with what their lives have become. Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt skillfully guides the production for maximum cathartic effect.

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Meet the Cartozians

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Meet the Cartozians

Two different views of immigration and assimilation hold sway in Talene Monahon’s Meet the Cartozians. Directed and expertly cast by David Cromer, the first half of Monahon’s play finds a naturalized Armenian American defending his citizenship in a landmark court case in 1925. In the second part, set a century later, the Armenian community has both thrived and splintered.

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Practice

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Practice

In his play Practice, Nazareth Hassan delivers an uncomfortable yet unflinching depiction of what it takes for an artist to achieve his vision, allowing director Keenan Tyler Oliphant to stage a powerful production that the script fully earns. The story follows a group of actors and an ascendant theater star, Asa Leon, who subjects them to a rigorous development process for his next project. Asa pursues his vision with messianic dedication, drawing his actors into that vision without regret or apology. The result is distressing, at times brutal, and ultimately thrilling.

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Wake

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Wake

Grief is very personal, and everyone processes it in their own way and in their own time. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Wake, written by Leon Ingulsbrud and Brooke Shilling, explores the contours of these stages through music, dialogue, musings, reflections, and poetry.

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Archduke

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Archduke

If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.

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Pygmalion

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Pygmalion

In his current revival of Pygmalion, director David Staller does more than remount Shaw’s 1912 comedy—he alters the play’s architecture by adding a mythic framing device led by four Olympian gods who introduce and comment on the action. This addition is not found in the published script, and theatergoers expecting a traditional revival may consider it a provocation. But Staller positions it as a reclamation rather than an invention.

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The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire

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The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire

Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, making its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre, defies categorization. The offbeat exploration of an agrarian California commune bordering on a cult might also defy comprehension; your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for unknowable mysteries. There is something mesmerizing about Burning Cauldron, beautifully strange and compelling, with silliness and menace existing so comfortably side by side. Who needs easy answers when the questions are this much fun?  

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Richard II

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Richard II

The Red Bull Theater production of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) is welcome, if only because it is so rarely staged. A Public Theater production scheduled for 2020 was presented online because of COVID; the last Delacorte production was in 1987. In the 2000s, BAM has hosted two major British productions: Ralph Fiennes in 2000, and David Tennant in 2016.

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Kyoto

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Kyoto

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s Kyoto, now playing at Lincoln Center after runs in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, opens by breaking the fourth wall and reminding the audience that “the times you live in are fucking awful.” The statement, delivered by the play’s narrator, Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), a right-wing Department of Energy lawyer during the Reagan administration and now a climate change–denying crusader, is preceded by video projections (designed by Akhila Krishnan) of Americans acting violently, including the Jan. 6 terrorists storming the Capitol. For Pearlman, the 1990s, the period on which the play concentrates, “were freakin’ glorious” by comparison.

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Playing Shylock

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Playing Shylock

Many an actor has played Shakespeare’s problematic Shylock, the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, since Elizabethan times. Even in “officially” Jew-free England (nominally from 1290–1656, though Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition did live there), stereotypes of Shylock the Jew prevailed. Yet relatively rarely has a Jewish actor been cast as Shylock, especially in today’s “cancel culture.” In Playing Shylock, dramatist Mark Leiren-Young’s solo play, actor Saul Rubinek channels this issue.

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The Wasp

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The Wasp

In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp, two women—Carla (Amy Forsyth) and Heather (Colby Minifie)—meet at an outdoor café. Carla arrives first. Heavily pregnant, she lights a cigarette and, even seated, has a swagger about her. When Heather enters and sees Carla, she launches into nervous small talk, which Carla swats away with silence. The initial tension seems to stem from Carla’s dour and angry demeanor, but as the play unfolds, the core conflict revolves around their shared past, future consequences, and a morally difficult proposition.

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Hannah Szenesh

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Hannah Szenesh

Holocaust historians have documented how heroes and heroines, Jews and Gentiles, put themselves at mortal risk to rescue others—but of those who have escaped, how many would re-enter a war zone and twice court danger? Hannah Szenesh, the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater’s one-woman musical drama, written and directed by David Schechter, is a sweeping testimony to the talent and courage of one such heroine.

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Endgame

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Endgame

“You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” The sentiment, bellowed by Hamm to his servant Clov in the Druid Theatre’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s postapocalyptic Endgame, is freshly relatable to a U.S. audience. Under Garry Hynes’s direction, this Endgame is full of laughs—both she and the ensemble fully grasp the idea expressed by Hamm’s trash-bin-residing mother, Nell, that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”—but it achieves this tone by leaning into, rather than shying away from, the play’s relentless bleakness.

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Truman vs. Israel

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Truman vs. Israel

When former President Harry S Truman agreed to be interviewed by young attorney Bella Abzug, he must have been oblivious to her reputation as a force with which to reckon. In William Spatz’s Truman vs. Israel, directed by Randy White, a retrospective that alternates between Abzug’s 1950s encounter with Truman and her post-Congress years, a still feisty Abzug unapologetically reminisces about that meeting and its outcomes.

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Awake and Sing!

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Awake and Sing!

Sea Dog Theater’s 90th-anniversary production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! features a multiracial cast that makes the Depression-era drama feel contemporary and highlights the universality of the play’s themes. Set in the 1930s, the play focuses on the Bergers, a Jewish family who live in one room in an apartment in the Bronx, and the impact of economic hardship, unfulfilled dreams, and the tension between idealism and survival.

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Crooked Cross

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Crooked Cross

In her all-too-brief life,  British author Sally Carson, who spent time in Germany prior to and after the Nazis’ rise to power, discerned a creeping fascism that would consume the country. Her 1934 novel Crooked Cross, and the stage version, produced in 1935 and 1937, echo Carson’s prescient warning of the hate and aggression that would propel Nazism into Europe.

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The Glitch

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The Glitch

Mad scientists and power-hungry robots have for generations warned about the perils of new technology and the consequences of messing with Mother Nature. The Glitch follows suit, though in a decidedly romanticized and optimistic fashion. Playwright Kipp Koenig, a former tech worker, has created not a Dr. Frankenstein but a nerdy scientist dealing with a little emotional baggage. And his invention is not a homicidal HAL à la 2001: A Space Odyssey but a cynical Siri who toys with her mortal underlings, though for the greater good.

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(un)conditional

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(un)conditional

Ali Keller’s (un)conditional, directed by Ivey Lowe, takes an unflinching look at two heterosexual marriages tested by sexual desires, shifting boundaries, and the uneasy bargains couples make in the name of love. With sharp writing and intimate staging, the play probes what one is willing to give—or give up—in relationships meant to last a lifetime.

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