Drama

,

The Strangest

,
The Strangest

The Fourth Street Theater is currently unrecognizable, as the theater company known as Semiotic Root has transformed the space into an intimate storytelling café—the sort found in North Africa. A patchwork of Persian carpets covers every inch of the floor, and hanging lanterns cast a warm glow across the carved wooden tables and plush floor cushions. The scent of strong coffee wafts through the air, and audience members are invited to help themselves to a cup. The setting is for playwright Betty Shamieh’s The Strangest, an absurdist murder mystery inspired by the unnamed Arab killed in Albert Camus’ classic novel, The Stranger, which is an emblem of mid-20th-century French existentialism.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Home/Sick

,
Home/Sick

The Weather Underground Organization, also know as the Weathermen, was a grassroots collective of white radical leftists who subscribed to a militant, anti-capitalist ideology. Splintering off from a larger organization called Students for Democratic Society (SDS) in the late 1960s, the Weather Underground believed in violence as a form of protest. Home/Sick is The Assembly’s theatrical reimagining of the Weather Underground’s founding, development, and eventual disbandment.  Written collectively by members of The Assembly, Home/Sick is a dynamic and thorough piece of devised theater that highlights the complex philosophies, political struggles, and practical idiosyncrasies behind the Weather Underground’s bygone revolution. 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Light Years

,
The Light Years

The variety of lights—glittering constellations, moon, explosions, electrical mishaps, the earth—that Russell H. Champa has produced abundantly in The Light Years are inventive and terrific. They don’t, however, illuminate what playwrights Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are getting at. Inspired by Bos’s childhood remembrances of family members who spoke of two world’s fairs held in Chicago, in 1893 and 1933, and by director Oliver Butler, who knew about real-life theatrical impresario Steele Mackaye, a forgotten innovator. Developed by Bos and Thureen for the Debate Society, The Light Years is a sort of pageant play glorifying scientific progress and human aspirations in the form of the inventions presented at the American expositions.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Sundown, Yellow Moon

,
Sundown, Yellow Moon

Everyone’s having trouble sleeping in Rachel Bonds’ wide-eyed new “nighttime play with music,” Sundown, Yellow Moon. Whether caused by nostalgia or longing, insomnia drives them out into the woods. Unlike Sondheim and Lapine’s fairytale populace, however, with their specific, measurable goals, Bonds’ messy humans are chasing a much more elusive ghost: peace.    

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Man from Nebraska

,
Man from Nebraska

Midlife crisis looms large in The Man from Nebraska, a 2003 play by Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy Letts (August: Osage County). In a series of swift, short scenes, barely punctuated by dialogue, or rather weighted down by silence, Letts delineates the life of the title character, the retired Ken Carpenter—a terrific Reed Birney. His retirement is spent eating at Outback Steakhouse with his wife, Nancy (Annette O’Toole, in an unshowy part rife with anguish and bewilderment), attending church together, and visiting his mother, Cammie, in a nursing home, where she suffers from either dementia or Alzheimer’s. They also see their daughter, Ashley, who lives nearby, although his granddaughter, Natalie, lives farther away.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Gravedigger’s Lullaby

,
The Gravedigger’s Lullaby

There’s been no shortage of blame on the Left since Trump’s stinging victory in November. Everyone’s got a pet scapegoat, but nearly all can agree that the Democrats lost in part because they’ve turned their backs on the white working class. The gulf between elites and plebs has never seemed so stark. Into this fraught debate wades Jeff Talbott’s new primal scream of a play, The Gravedigger’s Lullaby. It’s is an interesting tonal shift for Talbott, whose previous play, The Submission, was a knowing, winking story of liberal hypocrisy in the theater. His new work, populated by decidedly un-theatrical, salt-of-the-earth types, is an empathetic attempt to reach across the aisle. It’s an Age of Obama play in the Age of Trump that endeavors to restore the dignity of the working class.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Ring Twice for Miranda

,
Ring Twice for Miranda

Alan Hruska’s Ring Twice for Miranda, at City Center Stage II, is not the only recent play that features a dystopian society—it joins last year’s Mercury Fur (by Philip Ridley), and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, recently at BAM, and Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, playing at the Signature Theatre Center. Unlike those, however, it has startling echoes of—or perhaps pays homage to—European plays from the middle part of the last century—particularly ones by Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett and Jean Giraudoux.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

The Skin of Our Teeth

, ,
The Skin of Our Teeth

Thornton Wilder is best remembered as the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker, the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly! But his third great play, The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Elia Kazan in 1943, won the Pulitzer Prize, yet the tragicomedy is more spoken about than seen, perhaps because its demands are formidable. Wilder, a great experimentalist, uses every trick in the book to chart the survival of mankind, in the persons of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J., through the Ice Age, the Flood, untold wars and starving refugees.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Omega Kids

,
Omega Kids

Noah Mease’s play Omega Kids takes its name from a fictional comic book at the center of its story. In the comic, eight super-powered teens regroup in their hideaway following the traumatic loss of their leader. The weight of the past and apprehension for the future create a recriminatory atmosphere that threatens to turn violent until Kyle Kelley, the “Insomniac,” puts everyone to sleep. When Lucas Augur, “recently magical,” wakes up, he and Kyle take the first halting steps toward romance, acting on an attraction that until now has been merely implicit. The play itself is about a different pair of traumatized youths stumbling toward connection. What they’re looking for in each other, however, can’t be so easily classified.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Dolphins and Sharks

,
Dolphins and Sharks

The working class as a subject for drama has caught on since Donald Trump was voted into office—although prescient playwrights had cottoned to the richness of the issue well before the election. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, presented at the Public Theater in November, is moving to Broadway next month, but it had already been in the works a year before. James Anthony Tyler’s Dolphins and Sharks, now at the Labyrinth Theater, is equally worthy of notice. Although the Labyrinth production is billed as a world premiere, Tyler’s play has been in development since 2015. 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Fish Men

,
Fish Men

More than heated chess competitions occupies the center of Cándido Tirado’s New York premiere of Fish Men at INTAR, as five men who gather around the chess tables in Washington Square Park maneuver for higher stakes than mere checkmates in a game.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Kunstler

,
Kunstler

There should be a whole new word for “disheveled” to describe Jeff McCarthy in Kunstler. As William Kunstler in Jeffrey Sweet’s one-act snapshot of the liberal 20th-century lawyer, McCarthy looks terrible, sporting un-manicured sideburns, messy gray hair with Poindexter eyeglasses nestled in it, an awful tie, and a suit that looks like it was rolled around in dirt before curtain. The look reinforces that this legal near-icon wasn’t into appearances, and it jibes nicely with the shambling, authority-challenging portrait McCarthy and Sweet paint. After a strong beginning, Kunstler settles down into wandering monologue, and leaves some vital questions about its subject insufficiently answered. Still, this Kunstler-at-law is lively company. 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Orion

, ,
Orion

Orion, a new play by Matthew McLachlan and directed by Joshua Warr, opened on Valentine’s Day, but the theatrical lovefest dishes out more than sweet nothings. Indeed, this playwright’s first full-length production serves up handfuls of hearty truths. 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Evening at the Talk House

,
Evening at the Talk House

In 2015 the New Group staged Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, a brutal vision of depravity amid the detritus of a wrecked civilization. Now the same company, under the same director, Scott Elliott, is presenting Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a more subdued yet insinuating take on a society heading in the same direction. Yet the atmosphere is vastly different.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Sight Unseen

Sight Unseen

Donald Margulies, one of the most accomplished American playwrights, is probably less famous than he should be, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends (2000) and notable achievements such as Collected Stories (1996) and Time Stands Still (2010). It’s unlikely that the shoestring production of Sight Unseen at the charming Access Theater will add significantly to his reputation, but an exceptional cast and astute direction make the quaint, four-flight walkup worthwhile for theater lovers. (An elevator is also available.)

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, , ,

Drunkle Vanya

, , ,
Drunkle Vanya

“Remember that one Thanksgiving when your nearest and dearest sat down for a quiet game of Monopoly, but then your grandma got drunk and revealed a rich tradition of inbreeding?  Well, tonight should be something like that…except with a lot more vodka.” 

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Yours Unfaithfully

, ,
Yours Unfaithfully

Yours Unfaithfully, an unpublished, “un-romantic comedy” by Miles Malleson, gives its audience an intimate look at what it could be like to live in an open marriage, in 1933 and now. Mint Theater artistic director Jonathan Bank has unearthed Yours Unfaithfully and is presenting the world premiere.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Incident at Hidden Temple

,
Incident at Hidden Temple

Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

AdA: Author Directing Author

AdA: Author Directing Author

The third edition of AdA: Author Directing Author has programmed three one-acts based on the theme of power. This year AdA founders Neil LaBute and Marco Calvani are joined by Spanish playwright Marta Buchaca, with each presenting a play directed by one of the others.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

DannyKrisDonnaVeronica

,

DannyKrisDonnaVeronica is a captivating production about the modern family structure and the often untold truths of being a parent. Playwright Lawrence Dial explores the reality of marriage and life after children. Although it often seems taboo to speak about the visceral feelings of sadness and hopelessness associated with being a parent, Dial’s play explores the dichotomy of being completely enamored by one’s children while harboring feelings of dismay—the joys of having a family as well as those hidden, or rather, silent, moments of losing one’s identity and becoming irrelevant.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post