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.
The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.
A multitude of transgressions come to light in Terry Curtis Fox’s Transgression. This melodrama about New York artists consists of 19 scenes toggling back and forth between 2010 and 1970. At irregular intervals, the playwright detonates ugly, morally irksome surprises. The result is a two-hour, slow-motion collision between louche mores in the Warhol era and the subsequent new-millennial sensitivity that augured the eruption of #MeToo.
Rolling Thunder, a hybrid jukebox musical and Vietnam War docudrama, has, in fact, been on a roll. After opening in Brisbane in 2014, it toured Australia twice, in 2016 and 2023. Now, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, writer and onetime Sydney Morning Herald theater critic Bryce Hallett has adapted his script for an American audience, bringing this hard-rocking reckoning of the 1960s to New World Stages for its Off-Broadway premiere.
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.
Cracked Open is about one family’s journey with mental illness after their 18-year-old daughter suffers a psychotic breakdown. Presented during Mental Health Awareness Month, this drama, written and directed by Gail Kriegel, explores the stigma of mental illness and the often bewildering path for a family to find an effective treatment for a loved one.
In a letter to Jay Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Directions, in late 1945, Tennessee Williams wrote about his process: “All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of tortured going over and over—Battle [of Angels], [The Glass] Menagerie, the few good stories. ... But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.” The bill of two one-acts under the umbrella title Outraged Hearts—early versions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, revived by the Fire Weeds theater company—confirms the messiness Williams alludes to. As ambitious as Fire Weeds’ project is, it yields little beyond the confirmation of Williams’s own words.
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.
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.
The Mistake is a gripping and powerful examination of the decisions that went into the development of the atomic bomb and its initial deployment on Hiroshima. Written by cast member Michael Mears and directed by Rosamunde Hutt, the play is an unflinching look at the emotional and physical destruction of scientific breakthroughs when they are used to stop a war, as told by the inventor of the nuclear chain reaction, Leo Szilard.
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.
In 1969 the two-year-old Negro Ensemble Company mounted the off-Broadway premiere of Lonne Elder III’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men. “A remarkable play,” raved Clive Barnes in the New York Times. Now, in a joint presentation with the Peccadillo Theater Company and producer Eric Falkenstein, the NEC revisits this gut-punch period piece, offering a rock-solid production that hums along toward inevitable tragedy, chronicling the socioeconomic plight of Harlem in the 1950s through the deeds and decisions of one troubled family.
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.
Eliya Smith has chosen the title of her play Grief Camp cannily. The name nails down the setting and the situation, and it allows her to start the proceedings at a low key, with two of her six young people, Brad and Luna, talking in the dark after lights out. It scarcely matters that the audience can’t yet identify who is who, because the chitchat is innocuous: “Are you awake?” “I’m debating if I want to pee.” “I’m sorry about the stuff at the lake.”
There have been many memorable productions at the Irish Rep over the years—of Beckett, Synge, Friel, O’Casey, McPherson, and more—but with Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, it’s clear that the venerable nonprofit theater has a robust and self-deprecating sense of humor, able to laugh about the dominant tropes of Irish drama and the innumerable depictions of trauma and strife. Smyth’s play, developed under the theater’s New Play Development initiative and directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey, who leads that initiative, is a departure from its typical fare: a funny, satirical exploration of Irish theater, stories, and cultural identity.
“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”
Written in 2000 and inspired by the Y2K scare, Eric Bogosian’s dark apocalyptic play Humpty Dumpty is finally receiving its New York premiere after debuting at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., in 2002. At that time, Bogosian’s script included dialogue that eerily foreshadowed the September 11 attacks. Now it serves as a cautionary tale about mankind’s dependence on technology.
Any family rift can be gut-wrenching under the best of circumstances. But imagine the agony that ensues when one extricates oneself from a family and society whose unshakable beliefs are reinforced by centuries of tradition. Playwright Emil Weinstein’s Becoming Eve, based on Abby Chava Stein’s memoir, and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, expertly conveys this angst—and Chava’s conundrum.
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.
Upon the 1904 opening of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov notoriously fumed, “Stanislavski has ruined my play!” The playwright envisioned his work as a comedy with elements of farce, a stark contrast to the tragic conception of the renowned Moscow Art Theatre director. One wonders what these two artistic giants would think of the current interpretation now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews, this Donmar Warehouse production from London is spare, farcical, interactive, and grooves to an indie-music beat. While purists may scoff at this cheeky approach to Chekhov, this is a Cherry Orchard for our times.
Johnny G. Lloyd’s birthday birthday birthday follows a group of friends throughout the years as they celebrate milestone birthdays that two in their group share. The play begins as Marissa (Portland Thomas) and Clark (Justin Ahdoot) gather for their 21st-birthday party with their friends amid conversations about class, race, sexuality, hopes and dreams—with a helping of drugs, fights, cheating and gossip.
The hazards of embarking on a sexual adventure are weighed up against stagnation in Ken Urban’s Danger and Opportunity. Directed by Jack Serio, this provocative drama invites the audience to dismantle the traditional idea of marriage and take an unexpected journey into love, intimacy, and hope.
Gloaming, Nowhere is variously described as “the world’s first Neo-Appalachian, Afrolachian, Southern Pop Revusical,” a “patchwork kaleidoscopic collage,” and “a musical for people who don’t like musicals.” This show by quadruple-threat J.S. Streible (composer, lyricist, librettist, and sole performer) has landed on the micro-stage of the Huron Room in the basement of Off-Broadway’s SoHo Playhouse after a “multi-state Appalachian tour.” Streible makes no secret that he hopes Gloaming, Nowhere is destined for Broadway.
Anyone who has aspired to a career as an actor is likely to have experienced alternating emotional states—sometimes elation, frequently sadness—that accompany success, or the lack of it. Philippa Lawford’s thoughtful, often intense play Cold Water explores the way that youthful aspirations, tempered by reality, can elicit angst, confusion, anger, and occasionally relief, with varying impact, on two people at a British middle school.
Inspired by a true story, Max Mondi’s Maybe Tomorrow is a new drama that pushes the envelope on what it means to get stuck in the present. Directed by Chad Austin, this play takes a deep dive into mental illness and more.
