Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).
Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact.
Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane, set in 1935 inside Central State Hospital, a psychiatric institution built to confine “insane and idiotic negroes,” is a searing drama about confinement, despair, and the possibility of freedom. Structured in seven scenes, the play has a surreal texture that director Daniel Carlton brings to vivid life—a world in which even those resigned to death may dare to imagine freedom beyond the walls.
TThe Bathroom Attendant, by Tom Kelly, centers on Johnny (Dan Patrick Brady), an affable ex-prizefighter who is down on his luck in Las Vegas. Living in a rundown housing block on the outskirts of the city, Johnny currently works as a restroom attendant at the city’s Mob Museum, but he believes his fortune is just one winning hand away—if only he can scrape together enough cash to play.
In Sophie McIntosh’s new play benevolent, four young women in 1917 New York endure life inside the Inwood Benevolent Home, an ostensibly charitable reformatory for “fallen girls.” More specifically, the work is set in the basement laundry room, where the women wash soiled sheets, toiling over basins with washboards and helpings of borax. McIntosh uses this setting to explore issues of class, gender, and desire, all rooted in the relationships among the four residents.
Crikey! Garry Starr: Classic Penguins makes one wonder what the Aussies are consuming besides cold ones. A quarter century after Puppetry of the Penis, the lunatic 2001 production from Down Under that introduced “genital origami,” comes this brash, loopy clown show, written and performed by Garry Starr (the stage persona of Damien Warren-Smith).
Although the renowned 20th-century poet W. H. Auden dismissed The Taming of the Shrew as “the only play of Shakespeare’s that is a complete failure,” Laura Lapidus proves there is still plenty of life in the old comedy with To Have and To Hold, her contemporary reimagining that explores sisterhood, romantic love and the difficult business of coming into one’s own. Smartly directed by Zoë Adams and featuring a top-notch ensemble, this 85-minute romp through modern romance is both deliciously entertaining and unexpectedly poignant.
Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact.
Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane, set in 1935 inside Central State Hospital, a psychiatric institution built to confine “insane and idiotic negroes,” is a searing drama about confinement, despair, and the possibility of freedom. Structured in seven scenes, the play has a surreal texture that director Daniel Carlton brings to vivid life—a world in which even those resigned to death may dare to imagine freedom beyond the walls.
TThe Bathroom Attendant, by Tom Kelly, centers on Johnny (Dan Patrick Brady), an affable ex-prizefighter who is down on his luck in Las Vegas. Living in a rundown housing block on the outskirts of the city, Johnny currently works as a restroom attendant at the city’s Mob Museum, but he believes his fortune is just one winning hand away—if only he can scrape together enough cash to play.
In Sophie McIntosh’s new play benevolent, four young women in 1917 New York endure life inside the Inwood Benevolent Home, an ostensibly charitable reformatory for “fallen girls.” More specifically, the work is set in the basement laundry room, where the women wash soiled sheets, toiling over basins with washboards and helpings of borax. McIntosh uses this setting to explore issues of class, gender, and desire, all rooted in the relationships among the four residents.
La Femme Theatre Productions, dedicated to “exploring the female experience through classic and contemporary plays,” is presenting the first New York revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter. This largely forgotten play premiered on Broadway in 1997 with a first-rate cast, including the late Lynne Thigpen, who won a Tony Award for her superb performance as the protagonist’s best friend Judith. It closed after a paltry 89 performances. The revival, directed by Sarna Lapine, utilizes post-Broadway revisions by Wasserstein, who died in 2006 at age 55. The script-tinkering hasn’t fixed the problems of the original, and it undermines what Wasserstein accomplished in this not-so-bad high comedy, which, in the late 1990s, was timely and diverting (though it fell far short of the political heft she had intended).
Even a powerful story can become more compelling when told through the traditions of its culture. Such is the case with Samantha Blain’s new play Isla, which embraces puppetry, music and magical realism to tell, in 75 minutes, a story of how Blain’s family fled Cuba. The world premiere production is a bilingual shadow play with beautiful, lilting songs, accompanied by guitarist Claron Hayden. All the artistic elements come together in a wonderful, multifaceted production.
“A sad tale’s best for winter,” says Mamillius, the young son of Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicilia, in Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1610). Mamillius may be right, but a sad tale can also work on a sweltering night in Central Park, as Daniel Sullivan’s no-frills, emotionally intense staging demonstrates.
In John Donnelly’s The Pass, directed by Max Hunter, two rising British soccer stars confront the volatile intersection of masculinity, desire, and celebrity when a hotel-room encounter threatens to upend their carefully constructed futures. Spanning 12 years and three hotel rooms, this provocative drama tackles the high stakes of being young, ambitious, and closeted in a world where the pressure to perform extends far beyond the playing field.
Well, I’ll Let You Go, Bubba Weiler’s drama of grief and Midwestern angst, opened Off-Broadway a year ago this month, elevating the author from yeoman actor to New York’s most prominent emerging playwright. The Saviors, Weiler’s second play (now at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater) substantiates his promise, extending and arguably deepening his collaboration with director Jack Serio.
“A combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.” “Upside-down pineapple. Honeycomb spaceship/shawarma.” These descriptions of Vessel, the tourist attraction in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, are the most memorable lines in Brendan George’s well-intentioned play The Vessel, which has a lot to say but doesn’t say most of it in a theatrically exciting manner.
Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.
Comedian and stroke survivor Cat Cohen named her solo show Broad Strokes for the puns, but the titular phrase may be more appropriate in another, unintended sense. Cohen tells her story in such broad strokes that, while she succeeds in making her serious medical condition funny, the lack of depth and detail makes it seem not that serious.
What if men suddenly disappeared from the planet? Melissa Maney’s darkly comic Hungry Women, directed by Daniella Caggiano, imaginatively explores that provocative question across two centuries, using absurdism, macabre humor, and a feminist lens to examine how women might reconstruct society—and what they might ultimately discover they are most hungry for.
For its third mainstage production under new owners A24, Cherry Lane Theatre brings in a London success—Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander Shifters, directed by Lynette Linton—with some boldface names on its U.S. producing team, including actors Idris Elba and Danai Gurira and rapper Little Simz.
After spending decades bringing history’s greatest composers to vivid theatrical life, Hershey Felder turns his storytelling gifts inward in Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me. The result is an intimate and deeply affecting autobiographical portrait that reveals how music shaped not only an extraordinary career but also an extraordinary life.
Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World! explores gender identity, drag, and gay love in a dialogue-heavy production that opens on a bare stage reminiscent of a 1970s avant-garde drama. Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg exchange overripe melodramatic dialogue while moving and posing in tandem, using gestures that recall the 19th-century Delsarte system—back of hand to forehead, arms outstretched—executed with the measured precision of tai chi. The result is alternately intriguing and irritating, but emotionally remote.
In a recent New York Times interview, singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles remarked of her new show, Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, “The joke of it, the irony, is that my little musical about poison is the antidote we need right now.” Based on the audience response at a recent performance, her point was well taken. In witnessing a succession of abusive, barbarous, and toxic men succumbing to murder, many in the crowd clearly found their retribution. As news feeds clutter with stories of national leaders, Senate candidates, and millionaires evading justice for their crimes against women, there is indeed something quite gratifying about watching vigilante vengeance set to an intoxicating, pop-music beat.
Family entertainment often settles for amusing the children while asking adults to patiently endure the ride. The Listies: Make Some Noise gleefully defies that formula, delivering an hour of quick-witted comic anarchy in which playwright-performers Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly prove that silliness, when executed with razor-sharp timing and imagination, can delight audiences from preschoolers to grandparents.
