Drama

,

You Will Get Sick

,
You Will Get Sick

Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick is a surrealist, allegorical play about illness, loss, and human connection. The primary setting is The Big City, in something resembling modernity before cellular phones, though this is also a primeval, mythic world, where giant birds are liable to snatch you up (best to buy “certified bird insurance,” just in case). The characters are blasé about such events, but there’s also an awareness that something isn’t quite right: the play’s unseen narrator notes that “a bird caws outside your window / it’s too tremendous, too prehistoric / too loud for a city this big.”

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

A Man of No Importance

, , ,
A Man of No Importance

The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

A Delicate Balance

,
A Delicate Balance

Edward Albee’s 1966 Pulitzer Prize–winning A Delicate Balance begins in the evening and ends in the morning. Hidden terrors emerge and then suddenly disappear in a drama that could be titled Long Night’s Journey into Day. As one character says, “Darkness still frightens us,” and “when the daylight comes again . . . comes order with it.” In Jack Cummings III’s slyly off-kilter production, presented in partnership with Transport Group and the National Asian American Theatre Company, the play begins in total light and ends in complete darkness. The terrors do not dissipate at dawn but linger into a new day.

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

Candida

, ,
Candida

It’s been 128 years since George Bernard Shaw penned Candida as an ironic commentary on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. But the play is seldom staged, which is a pity because, as David Staller’s new adaptation shows, this 1895 feminist comedy is a gem. Staller has transported the play from the northeast suburbs of 19th-century London to Harlem in 1929. While some theatergoers might miss the British flavor of Shaw’s original text, Staller’s version brings New York grit to the drama.

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

Chekhov’s First Play

, , , ,
Chekhov’s First Play

The Irish experimental theater company Dead Centre is taking a wrecking ball to Chekhov’s unwieldy five-hour play Platonov (also known as Untitled Play) with its new metatheatrical work, Chekhov’s First Play. Devised and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, this 70-minute production is a radical reworking of the original four-act drama, playfully magnifying its follies and the overreach of its young playwright, who penned it before he was 20.

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

Everything’s Fine

, , ,
Everything’s Fine

If big-city Easterners could imagine what life in Midland, Texas, is like, they might conjure up images of a remote, semirural, small city with mundane lifestyles, cowboy hats, and thick drawls. Well, most of the stereotypical descriptors don’t apply here. Other than for the Texas sand, wind, and heat that Douglas McGrath describes in his solo play Everything’s Fine, there is much in McGrath’s story about growing up there that is universal.

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

The Winter’s Tale

, ,
The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale poses two huge challenges to any director. One is that Leontes, the king of Sicilia who has been hosting his bosom buddy Polixenes, king of Bohemia, for nine months, suddenly and without reason suspects his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his old friend. The other is a jump in time between the first three acts—steeped in tragedy—to a fourth act of pastoral comedy, and a last act of redemption. Director Eric Tucker’s production of The Winter’s Tale for Bedlam seems to have taken its approach from the company’s title: it’s almost all bedlam.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Chester Bailey

,
Chester Bailey

Ephraim Birney, who plays the titular character in Joseph Dougherty’s Chester Bailey, mentions in his playbill bio that he “bears a striking resemblance to his co-star.” His co-star is the acclaimed theater actor Reed Birney, Ephraim’s father, and Ephraim is correct about the resemblance, not just in physical terms but also in talent: Chester Bailey showcases two fine actors in a play about trauma, delusion, and regret.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Dodi & Diana

,
Dodi & Diana

The come-hither title of Colt Coeur’s Dodi & Diana is essentially a bait-and-switch. For the most part, the characters in Kareem Fahmy’s two-hander are not the lovers whom one expects. They’re a married couple, Jason and Samira, who are well off and a bit New Age. Samira does kundalini, while Jason sees an astrologer, Vincent, who has told him that he and Samira are “astrological doubles” for Diana Spencer and her Muslim boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. Happily, Fahmy’s tricksy title masks a play that’s interesting and well-performed.

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

Hedda Gabler

, ,
Hedda Gabler

Just in time for Halloween, the Off-Off-Broadway troupe Bedlam is spicing up its presentation of Hedda Gabler with a Walpurgisnacht dance. That unexpected choreographic interpolation, with flashing lights, thump-y music, and Hellfire Club costumes, might strike the fancy of Sigmund Freud but would certainly surprise the play’s author, Henrik Ibsen—and perhaps also Jon Robin Baitz, whose adaptation, based on Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey’s translation, the production utilizes.

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

Peerless

, ,
Peerless

This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.

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

Powerhouse

, ,
Powerhouse

Feminists will undoubtedly rejoice at David Harms’s new play, Powerhouse, and its central character, a passionate and fearless lawyer in her prime who unapologetically speaks truth to power. Briskly directed by Ken Wolf, Powerhouse takes the complex subject of fraternization among coworkers out of the shadows and brings it into the daylight.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Sea Lady

,
The Sea Lady

In 1930, the theater artist Neith Boyce was commissioned to adapt H. G. Wells’s 1901 fantasy novel The Sea Lady for the stage. After five years of work, and with a Broadway production planned, Wells’s agent rescinded the rights to the novel, and the play was never seen. For decades the manuscript resided at Yale’s Beinecke Library, until Boyce’s biographer sent it to the Metropolitan Playhouse, which is currently staging the play’s world premiere under the direction (and design) of the company’s artistic director, Alex Roe.

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

As You Like It

, ,
As You Like It

Maybe it’s the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the subsequent House Committee hearings this past summer, but the idea of fleeing to the Forest of Arden has rarely been so enticing. Directors often reinvent it as a rowdy retreat, replete with music and dance, but in Lynnea Benson’s production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Arden is mellow, soft, and dappled in sylvan light (created by Dennis Parichy).

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

I’m Revolting

,
I’m Revolting

Hospital waiting rooms are queasy yet strangely intimate spaces that have a way of whittling away pretense and revealing a person’s true self. Relationships with strangers can feel significant. Sensitive information about bodies is routinely, almost blithely, discussed. Gracie Gardner makes use of this fraught setting in I’m Revolting, which takes place in the waiting area of a skin-cancer clinic in New York City in 2019. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the play has flashes of excellence but never fully coheres or figures out what story, exactly, it is telling.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

,
Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

On Feb. 18, 1965, author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale) debated whether “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in England. The debate generated excitement and interest at the time—as described by historian Kevin Schultz, more than 700 (white) students showed up, and filled the room to overflowing. The face-off, reenacted in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, has since become legendary, the subject of books and documentaries, in particular because of Baldwin’s brilliant dissection of race in America, which continues to be painfully relevant today.

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

Our Man in Santiago

, ,
Our Man in Santiago

If you like political satire with a twist of espionage, look no further than Mark Wilding’s new play, Our Man in Santiago. Directed by Charlie Mount, this comic spy thriller, inspired by the failed U.S. attempt in the 1970s to depose Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected left-wing leader, can reawaken one to the spectacular misfires of American adventurism.

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

This Beautiful Future

, ,
This Beautiful Future

A woman walks over to a large flat-screen TV and, using the remote control, selects a karaoke track. Believe it or not, this is the start of a play set in occupied France in 1944: This Beautiful Future, directed by Jack Serio. That woman and her male counterpart—theater vets Angelina Fiordellisi and Austin Pendleton as characters named Angelina and Austin—are on stage for the entire 80-minute running time, but the story really centers on two teenagers: Otto, a German soldier stationed in Chartres in the summer of ’44, and Elodie, a local girl. They’re both painfully naive. She thinks her Jewish neighbors will eventually come home; he’s psyched to march into England and anticipates a quick British surrender.

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

Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

, ,
Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

David Strathairn, whose stellar career as a character actor has spanned decades, gives a brilliant, riveting solo performance in Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. Playing a Pole who experienced the Holocaust, he draws on historical evidence and the testimony that playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman employ in their portrait of a righteous and desperate man determined to prevent the annihilation of his country’s Jews. This is the real-life Karski, humble, modest, and painfully aware of what he could do, and more so of what he could not do, to save them.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Jasper

,
Jasper

It is perhaps sign of these pandemic times that several Off-Broadway plays opening in the coming weeks all deal with severe illness. Manhattan Theater Club will stage Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, featuring a character with cerebral palsy. At the Atlantic, Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting is set in a skin-cancer clinic, and next month the Roundabout offers a work by Noah Diaz with the on-the-nose title, You Will Get Sick. But first, the Yonder Window Theatre Company gives us Jasper, a thought-provoking drama in which a boy with a fatal illness tests the limits of his caring parents.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post