It’s amazing how Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and her first cousin Eleanor, renowned wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), sustained a relationship for more than six decades, given their polar-opposite dispositions. Blood is not necessarily thicker than water, and yet these two disparate personalities—the former, a socialite and senator’s wife, and the other, a political force and humanitarian in her own right, do not sever ties. Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts, Ellen Abrams’s new play about that relationship, deals with these celebrated women’s close camaraderie from childhood through FDR’s death.
Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight
Lauren Gunderson is the most successful playwright you’ve never heard of—if you are a New York theatergoer. She has topped American Theatre magazine’s annual list of most-produced playwrights in three of the last five years and ranked second in the other two, but her work is mostly done by regional theaters. Gunderson’s Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight, for example, has been staged from Maryland to Wisconsin to New Mexico to Australia since it premiered at California’s South Coast Rep in 2009, but is just now arriving Off-Broadway.
Smart
The opening scene of Act II of Smart is not a typical meet-cute. One person is grieving the recent death of her father and looking at an apartment she can’t afford. The other is the broker, who in her downtime has an even more difficult job of caring for a mother with dementia. Still, “meet-cute” seems a good description because the actors, well, they are cute, and they act cute as their conversation veers away from real estate and they discover what they have in common.
Día y Noche
Día y Noche is a dynamic, energy-filled new play by David Anzuelo that chronicles the lives of two teenage boys, Danny Guerrero and Martin Leonard Brown, growing up in El Paso, Texas, during the 1980s. Danny (Freddy Acevedo) and Martin (Neil Tyrone Pritchard) are polar opposites, yet their friendship is one of the best relationships they could have imagined.
How to Defend Yourself
Liliana Padilla’s new play How to Defend Yourself tells the story of college students attempting to make sense of relationships, sexuality, and consent. Co-directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin, and Steph Paul, the drama unfolds in a college gym where a group of women are meeting for a self-defense class. The class is the brainchild of Brandi (Talia Ryder) and Kara (Sarah Marie Rodriguez) after the violent sexual assault of a fellow classmate, Susannah, on campus. Brandi and Kara are in Susannah’s sorority, and they’ve decided to do more than just talk about the incident. “It’s so easy to do nothing. Right?” Brandi says. “We wanted to do something.”
Arden of Faversham
The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.
The Hunting Gun
The Hunting Gun, an avant-garde piece of theater by Serge Lamothe, is a remarkably mesmerizing work, but it also presents challenges to a viewer: only one of its two performers speaks, and then it’s entirely in Japanese (there are surtitles in English). Adapted from a novel of the same name by Yasushi Inoue, the work begins with a prologue. An author, heard over a loudspeaker, recites a poem called Hunting Gun—written about a man with “a double-barreled Churchill.” The author subsequently received a letter from Josuke Misugi, who claims to be the man who inspired the poem. Out of the blue, he tells the author, he is sending him three letters in the hopes that he (or perhaps just someone, anyone) will understand his life.
This G*d Damn House
In spite of its off-putting title, Matthew McLachlan’s This G*d Damn House delivers two hours of satisfying theater that touches on loneliness, mental illness, homelessness, and more. Directed by Ella Jane New, this show is for gutsy theatergoers who like their drama to smack of real-life situations and push the theatrical envelope.
The Coast Starlight
Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight is one of those “ship of fools” dramas that throw together unacquainted travelers on a common carrier. The title comes from a real passenger-train service running daily from Los Angeles to Seattle. Amtrak’s website promises potential Coast Starlight customers a “grand West Coast train adventure … pass[ing] through Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Portland.” For Bunin’s characters, however, the reality is not so much an adventure as an anxious long-haul.
Pericles
Shakespeare’s romance Pericles has washed up at the Doxsee, the Brooklyn home of Target Margin Theater, with all the “outrageous fortune” in the 1607–08 play intact. Clocking in at 105 minutes, this new staging by David Herskovits, though wildly uneven, delivers some limpidly beautiful moments that redeem the production.
Love
Alexander Zeldin’s Love is a remarkably naturalistic and empathetic work about individuals and families experiencing homelessness. The play takes place in an emergency housing facility in London and was created in collaboration with those who have firsthand experience of such a setting. Zeldin writes in a program note that “a crucial step in the creation of Love was meeting these families, visiting their homes over two years, involving them in workshops and rehearsals, and improvising with them on the subjects and scenes in the play.”
Crumbs from the Table of Joy
Lynn Nottage. Author of a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece (Sweat), another Pulitzer winner (Ruined), a wild phantasmagorical comedy with revealing things to say about the underclass (Clyde’s), a heartrending miniature she also skillfully adapted into an opera (Intimate Apparel), and several others. Who wouldn’t want to see a little-known early work of hers? Not for nothing is Keen Company promoting Crumbs from the Table of Joy as “the Lynn Nottage play you don’t know (yet).”
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Last summer the Ruth Stage production of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre at St. Clement’s. The critical responses were uniformly mixed-to-negative, and OffOffOnline’s Charles Wright described it as a “lumbering version” of the play under Joe Rosario’s direction. Now in a “re-engagement,” as the publicity materials describe the current iteration, the production has been substantially recast, and there are a few directorial modifications. While this Cat 2.0 still lumbers, there is a noticeable improvement along with glimmers of fresh insight into the mendacious, caustic, and fiercely combative characters who populate Williams’s Mississippi Delta estate.
The Trees
Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees is a quirky and ambitious new play that may please some environmentalists and Thoreau-minded folk, but many theatergoers may find it hard to warm up to this work, populated with a dozen characters, many of whom flit in and out of the play in will-o’-the-wisp fashion. Directed by Tina Satter, The Trees investigates the American dream and questions whether stability is possible in a capitalistic world.
Conversations After Sex
The racy, come-hither title of Mark O’Halloran’s 70-minute work disguises a fascinating drama en déshabillé that explores the loneliness that underlies anonymous sexual encounters and a desire by participants to connect more fully than only with sex. Though the conversations follow intercourse, they reveal more about the characters’ lives up to that point than what happens afterward. Staged with simplicity and power by Tom Creed, O’Halloran’s play is thought-provoking, sad, and thoroughly engaging.
The Best We Could
An hour into The Best We Could, you realize you’re not watching the play you thought you were. Emily Feldman’s new drama seemed like it was a semi-experimental staging of a cross-country drive during which a grown woman and her dad visit national parks and revisit moments in their lives. Then, all of a sudden, it’s about something very specific beyond the sightseeing, bonding and memories. And the play belongs to a particular category of stories—and that category is not road trips or family relationships or Our Town riffs.
Black Odyssey
In Black Odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley has undertaken an ambitious conflation of Homer’s epic poem with the history of Black people in America. In this lively, overstuffed and often bewildering fantasia, Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) struggles to find his way back to his family in Harlem after a discharge from the war in Afghanistan. He ends up homeless and then in a mental hospital, while his journey is overseen from Olympus by his allies Deus (i.e., Zeus, played by James T. Alfred) and Athena (Harriet D. Foy), and from the ocean by his enemy Paw Sidin (i.e., Poseidon), who is determined to kill him.
Othello
The New Place Players’ production of Othello at Casa Clara, a former foundry replete with balconies and staircases, is an unusual, site-specific staging that pulls the audience into the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Makenna Masenheimer directs the 1604 tragedy without a fourth wall, and a limited audience of 50 assures an intimate experience.
The Seagull/Woodstock, NY
Anton Chekhov’s 1895 chestnut, The Seagull, has always been a crowd pleaser. The tale of unrequited love and petty jealousy among egomaniacal adults and self-doubting youths, sown through with treatises on the craft of writing and the purpose of theater, then capped with a dead bird and a tragic ending, has spawned eight Broadway productions over the past century.
Letters from Max, a ritual
Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual, is an adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, which included letters between Ruhl and Max Ritvo, her playwriting student and, shortly thereafter, friend. Ritvo died at age 25, of a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric cancer first diagnosed when he was 16. He graduated from college while undergoing chemotherapy and surgeries, producing poetry and plays and music along the way, becoming a teacher to Ruhl as much as she was to him.