Reviews

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Cold War Choir Practice

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Cold War Choir Practice

It’s 1987 and the Cold War is in the air at Roll-a-Rama in Syracuse, N.Y. Ten-year-old Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) lives above the family business with her former Black Panther father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), and grandmother Puddin (Lizan Mitchell). When she’s not shoveling snow in exchange for candy, Meek is occupied with stocking her fallout shelter and singing in a Cold War–themed children’s choir, the Seedlings of Peace, much to her father’s chagrin. This is the world of Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice. What’s exciting about this play is that it feels sui generis: it’s part farce, part family drama, part surreal global-political meditation, and part musical.

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Dust of Egypt

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Dust of Egypt

Dust of Egypt: The Story of Sojourner Truth dramatizes a little-known chapter in the famed abolitionist’s life when, as a young mother, she fought to rescue her 5-year-old son after he was illegally sold down South. Karin Abarbanel’s play turns this legal battle—the first time a Black woman successfully sued a white slave owner—into a stirring portrait of maternal courage and moral defiance.

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The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits

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The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits

Many elements of Michael Shaw Fisher’s comedy The Amazing Sex Life of Rabbits remind one of other works that use the familiar trope of a childless couple, unable to conceive, going to extreme lengths to become parents. Here, the factors that decide the deal are typical of the darker riff on the Golden Rule—i.e., “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” In Fisher’s 75-minute show at the Fringe Encore Series, fanciful variations on the trope provide enough laughs to forget today’s economic disparities.

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Spare Parts

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Spare Parts

Playwright David J. Glass also happens to be a biomedical scientist with an expertise in age-related loss of muscle mass. So it is not a shock that his new work of science fiction, Spare Parts, is concerned with the limitations of growing old. What is more surprising is that the protagonist at the center of these medical proceedings has a plan for creating life that Doctor Frankenstein would envy, along with a thirst for blood motivated by desires in the vein of Count Dracula.

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Zack

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Zack

Last fall the Mint Theater revived Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1935), a warning about encroaching fascism—sadly relevant once again. Its current production, Harold Brighouse’s Zack (1920), is less overtly political but offers its own quiet consolation: a romantic-comic parable in which everyday kindness and decency triumph over avarice and cruelty.

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Our House

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Our House

Barry Boehm’s play Our House deals partly with family strife—a staple of American drama for a century—with the added difference that four of the six characters are gay. A long night of drinking and drug-taking puts it squarely in the vein of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a show in which one of Boehm’s characters happens to be starring, in a community theater production. More particularly, the primarily gay characters echo any number of engaging dramas, from The Boys in the Band to Love! Valour! Compassion! to My Night with Reg.

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Silver Manhattan

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Silver Manhattan

Silver Manhattan, a modestly scaled musical about guitarist-singer Jesse Malin that was recently workshopped at the Gramercy Theatre, has moved downtown to the Bowery Palace, a gemütlich arts venue that opened last month. At street level, the Palace is an upscale bar; the basement, previously a dance club, is now a cozy, 100-seat playhouse, ideal for Silver Manhattan.

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Chinese Republicans

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Chinese Republicans

Four employees of investment bank Friedman Wallace gather for an “affinity group” meeting. Their affinity? They are women of Chinese descent. Yet Alex Lin chose to name her new play Chinese Republicans. Consider it the first sign of dissonance in Lin’s ineffectual script.

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The Reservoir

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The Reservoir

Josh, protagonist of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, is a New York University drama student and veteran blackout drunk. Careless and self-centered, Josh spreads pandemonium wherever he goes. Irksome as this conduct may be for those around him—especially his long-suffering mother (Heidi Armbruster), Josh is an audience charmer. Credit for that goes to Brasch’s wit and an adroit performance by leading-actor Noah Galvin. Yet the achievement of this production owes less to the comic capital of the central character than to the heartfelt depiction of Josh’s grandparents, embodied by four notable veterans of the New York stage: Caroline Aaron, Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, and Chip Zien.

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You Got Older

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You Got Older

Clare Barron’s 2014 You Got Older is a comedy of many colors. In this revival at the handsomely renovated Cherry Lane Theatre, Freudian fantasy shares the stage with elements of a traditional rom-com, while gross-out jokes demand equal time against moments of heartwarming family humor. But primarily the intermissionless play is a bittersweet buddy comedy, a keenly observed tale of a sick father and the grown daughter who comes home to see him through his illness. Their sporadic bouts of bonding and awkward conversations provide comfort and support, even as their physical bodies and emotional losses betray them.

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Meat Suit

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Meat Suit

No one in Aya Ogawa’s Meat Suit ever speaks or explains the title phrase, but based on its use in fantasy literature and a Netflix documentary, it refers to a human body inhabited by a demon or alien. The play’s subtitle, The Shitshow of Motherhood, also conjures a negative impression of motherhood. So, too, does almost everything in the show—and in exhaustingly absurdist fashion. The play may not turn anyone off to motherhood, but it could turn people off to any future theatrical explorations of it.

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Marcel on the Train

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Marcel on the Train

The Marcel Marceau that most people, or at least most theater aficionados, know was one of the world’s greatest mimes. As Bip, a lovable, quirky, charming clown, he regaled audiences with a worn top hat from which protruded a floppy red flower. Marceau’s vulnerable and self-effacing persona, though, was but a thin veil obscuring his heroism during World War II, as recounted in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s Marcel on the Train.

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The Other Place

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The Other Place

At the outset of Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place, a funerary urn, unburied but long ignored, sets off a near-nuclear explosion of familial conflict. It’s a humdinger of a beginning; but, as this short, bleak drama proceeds, the motives of the principal characters remain obscure and the twists in the plot, though often startling, can’t conceal the script’s logical lacunae. It’s a striking weakness, since The Other Place is inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, a compact, laser-focused tragedy that’s intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

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Hate Radio

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Hate Radio

In Hate Radio, Swiss writer-director Milo Rau turns the stage into a time capsule of terror, reconstructing the Rwandan radio station RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), whose jovial hate-fueled broadcasts paved the road to genocide. Listening through headsets as slurs curdle into directives, the audience is left to reckon not only with history’s horrors but with unnerving echoes in today’s media-saturated America.

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The Waterfall

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The Waterfall

The same week Haiti was represented in Winter Olympics competition for only the second time in history, WP Theater made its contribution to Haitian pride with the world premiere of The Waterfall, a Haitian American family drama written by Phanésia Pharel, the daughter of Haitian immigrants.

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Beneath the Ice of the Vistula

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Beneath the Ice of the Vistula

In Roman Freud’s Beneath the Ice of the Vistula, a Polish-Jewish composer named Adam Kobylanski agonizes over a musical composition that he is sure will be a masterpiece. The year is 1939. The Nazi invasion looms on the horizon but is still far enough away that Adam has the time and space to work on his composition in peace.

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The Dinosaurs

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The Dinosaurs

Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs is a meditation on sobriety and female friendship. It unfolds within a women’s and trans-inclusive alcohol-recovery group dubbed the Saturday Survivors, a nod to the day of the week they meet over coffee, scones, and doughnuts in a bland, white, windowless community room with folding chairs (scenic design by dots). Under Les Waters’s direction, the 70-minute play, which features a remarkable ensemble of actors, slides from a naturalistic mode into an experimental one, as time and identity are upended. The experiment, however, proves frustratingly vague rather than provocative.

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The Tragedy of Coriolanus

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The Tragedy of Coriolanus

The setting for the Theatre for a New Audience’s production of The Tragedy of Coriolanus is “just after now.” Teeming with multimedia elements, including combat surveillance footage, a four-sided video screen suspended above the stage, and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the conceit effectively mirrors how contemporary politics and war are manipulated by selective images and social media. The drawback to this interpretation is that the volatile relationship between the ruling elite and the common people, so central to Shakespeare’s play, feels elusive and out-of-reach in this nominally futuristic world.

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The Monsters

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The Monsters

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is the ostensible subject of Ngozi Anyanwu’s taut two-hander The Monsters, now running Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club after a fall stint at Two River Theater in New Jersey—but the play’s true combat is emotional. Beyond the excellent choreography and fight direction (by Rickey Tripp and Gerry Rodriguez, respectively), the deeper exhilaration stems from seeing two actors, Aigner Mizzelle as Lil and Okieriete Onaodowan as her big brother Big, deliver beautifully realized performances.

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Hold On to Your Butts

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Hold On to Your Butts

Hold On to Your Butts, directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, proves that epic spectacle can be conjured from little more than bodies, sound effects, and boundless imagination, as two actors and a sound-effects artist recreate Jurassic Park shot for shot, live onstage. The result is an exuberant collision of physical comedy, sound, and affectionate parody—a love letter to both movies and theater.

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