“You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” The sentiment, bellowed by Hamm to his servant Clov in the Druid Theatre’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s postapocalyptic Endgame, is freshly relatable to a U.S. audience. Under Garry Hynes’s direction, this Endgame is full of laughs—both she and the ensemble fully grasp the idea expressed by Hamm’s trash-bin-residing mother, Nell, that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”—but it achieves this tone by leaning into, rather than shying away from, the play’s relentless bleakness.
When former President Harry S Truman agreed to be interviewed by young attorney Bella Abzug, he must have been oblivious to her reputation as a force with which to reckon. In William Spatz’s Truman vs. Israel, directed by Randy White, a retrospective that alternates between Abzug’s 1950s encounter with Truman and her post-Congress years, a still feisty Abzug unapologetically reminisces about that meeting and its outcomes.
Rarely does a play get off to such a torturous start for its audience like Art of Leaving. The first scene of Anne Marilyn Lucas’s feeble comedy is a portrait of emotional abuse played for laughs, and interrupted only by a tedious monologue about shopping for lunch. Humor in the rest of the play draws on such worn-out sources as Yiddishisms, stereotypes of feminists and Jewish mothers, and mishearing by old people.
The flirtation between theater and television has turned serious in recent seasons. Small-screen favorites Stranger Things and Smash were adapted for Broadway, and Schmigadoon! is on tap for next spring. Meanwhile, Off-Broadway satires of The Office and Friends have settled into long runs. Now add to the lineup Not Ready for Prime Time, a new play by Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers. Neither an adaptation nor a parody, this likable, free-flowing piece is more a biographical comedy, albeit an unauthorized one.
In Heaux Church, writer-performer Brandon Kyle Goodman turns the traditional sermon on its head, transforming sex education into a joyful act of healing and self-acceptance. Directed by Lisa Owaki Bierman, and with DJ Ari Grooves and Greg Corbino backing a gospel of pleasure and pride, Goodman delivers a rousing, tongue-in-cheek service that’s part confession, part celebration.
In Heaux Church, writer-performer Brandon Kyle Goodman turns the traditional sermon on its head, transforming sex education into a joyful act of healing and self-acceptance. Directed by Lisa Owaki Bierman, and with DJ Ari Grooves and Greg Corbino backing a gospel of pleasure and pride, Goodman delivers a rousing, tongue-in-cheek service that’s part confession, part celebration.
Anonymously penned scripts are rare—and rarer still when the identity of one of its two characters is obscured. In Murdoch: The Final Interview, a multimedia drama/farce directed by Christopher Scott, that actor portrays both an enigmatic interviewer and media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Brian Watkins’s Weather Girl is a state-of-the-nation play that delivers 70 minutes of theatrical fireworks and a dire warning. No names of politicians or officeholders get mentioned; no political parties or ideologies are discussed. Yet Weather Girl is unmistakably about our nation’s well-being (or lack thereof), with special attention to the lethal effect we’ve had on the earth and its atmosphere.
In The Day I Accidentally Went to War, comedian Bill Posley turns a twist of fate into a riveting true tale of survival, absurdity, and the scars of service. Under the deft direction of Bente Engelstoft, Posley’s solo show fuses sharp comedy with searing truth to capture the American veteran’s experience in all its contradictions.
In his solo show ta-da!, Josh Sharp draws on his immense charm and deft wit to navigate subjects that are far weightier than his upbeat title implies. They include pedophilia, cancer, gay-bashings of varying intensity, and a near-death experience. He does it while holding a clicker that initially projects everything he says on a screen behind him precisely: “Hi. Hello. What’s up. How are you? Hi. Hello. Hi. Welcome.” His diction is crisp and clear, so there’s really no need for the screen, except as a display of physical stamina and memory, and a source of visual variety. Eventually, though, under Sam Pinkleton’s direction, Sharp’s script and the screen projections diverge amusingly to add a layer of comic counterpoint—a practice that reaches back to Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.
In Can I Be Frank?, comedian Morgan Bassichis resurrects the memory of pioneering gay performer Frank Maya with a blend of irreverent wit, original songs, and aching vulnerability. Written by Bassichis, and directed by recent Tony winner Sam Pinkleton, this solo show becomes both séance and self-portrait, blurring the lines between tribute and personal reckoning.
Carl Holder’s new show is called Out of Order because, while it has all the usual components of a play—not only plot components like “inciting incident” and “rising action” but production components such as the curtain call, a talkback, even a content warning—they don’t occur in their usual order.
If the British actress Gertrude Lawrence is remembered at all nowadays, it is primarily for originating the part of Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951). She didn’t get the role in the 1956 film, and her reputation rests on a long theatrical career in Britain and America, as Lucy Stevens’s gossipy Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening, makes clear.
Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water, like the dramatist himself, is charming and effervescent. Also like Haddad, it’s slender (though that word has different connotations when applied to the human form and to an Off-Broadway play).
Mona Pirnot’s new play, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, concerns the hardscrabble existence of aspiring playwrights and the passion that keeps them writing for an industry in which, as playwright Robert Anderson ostensibly said, it’s possible to make a killing but never a living. David Greenspan is the very model of a theater artist who has persevered despite dire fiscal odds. Greenspan is pretty well-known Off-Broadway and, especially, Off-Off Broadway, but he’s certainly not a household name.
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.
“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.”
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.
A one-man Uncle Vanya could easily have come off as a stunt. How do you turn an Anton Chekhov staple, one that has visited New York stages multiple times in the past few seasons alone, into a solo show, and an utterly new experience? But Vanya turns out to be good theater and, more surprisingly, very good Chekhov.
Kevin James Doyle has a good story to tell in his solo show After Endgame—along with several engaging digressions. But none of it has to do with performing in the play Endgame by Samuel Beckett. The endgame of the title is the last third of a chess match, Doyle explains. “Blunders typically happen in the endgame,” he warns, when only a few pieces remain on the board.
Beckett Briefs, the rubric for three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre, provides a rare look at works by the dramatist whose Waiting for Godot has overshadowed all theater since the mid-20th-century. The progression of plays devised by director Ciarán Hinds moves from the slightest, Not I, featuring only a mouth speaking, to Play, in which only three heads appear, to the longest, and most fruitfully theatrical, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, head to toe. All three works are suffused with regrets about or outrage at the setbacks, blunders, jealousy, and dishonesty in the characters’ lives.
On a daily basis, news feeds and media broadcasts are saturated with reports, images, and updated statistics about the brutal destruction in Gaza. After a while, even when there is a pause in the attacks and counterattacks, the repeated and constant exposure can numb one’s emotional response and make it harder to feel empathy for those directly affected. Writer and performer Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof notably highlights the real human suffering caused by war, while also challenging audiences to contemplate how they would cope with such ever-present trauma.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
“Do you all eat grapes?” James Hindman asks, proffering a bowl of green grapes at the outset of his one-man show, What Doesn’t Kill You, directed by Suzanne Barabas, artistic director of the New Jersey Repertory Company, where this show began its theatrical life. And while Hindman perhaps doesn’t want anyone to leap to their feet and grab a grape, this kind of seemingly non-rhetorical question is part of the audience intimacy he develops throughout the piece (and indeed some audience members did call out at various prompts, though no one took a grape). Hindman’s friendly, casual style establishes rapport, and once everyone is comfortable, he becomes a tour guide on his personal journey into and out of a New Jersey hospital, after suffering the kind of heart attack that one nurse refers to as the “widow maker.”
David Finnigan’s performance piece on the climate crisis, Deep History, now playing at the Public Theater after stops elsewhere, including the Edinburgh Fringe, will inevitably be compared to a TED talk: Finnigan is scientifically fluent and uses images from his laptop (video design by Hayley Egan) to craft a deeply informed narrative of climate and human history, with some autobiography and whimsy mixed in. TED talks can be engaging, of course, and Finnigan is certainly that; but this description also sells Finnigan short. There is theatricality at work in the 65-minute piece, directed by Annette Mees, particularly a twist in the storytelling that revolves around the gap between 2019 (when the piece was written) and the time when it is performed.
