Boundaries of all types are tested in Ronnie Larsen’s comedic and big-hearted family chronicle, The Actors. The line between Democrat and Republican is pulled taut, as is the division between atheist and religious believer. But those are relatively minor concerns for the playwright. More to the point are the boundaries of grief and how to break through them, the borders of what constitutes a family, and what limits stage actors might burst through when their roles take over their lives. As farcical as it is melancholy, there are as many surprise door knocks in the play’s two acts and two hours as there are woeful revelations.
Near the end of the Barry Manilow musical Harmony, the surviving Comedian Harmonist Ari Leschnikoff, “a Bulgarian singing waiter” who survived the Holocaust to return to his home country, brags to a rabbi: “We saved them, Rabbi! Every Jewish person in Bulgaria! We wouldn’t let them have them! Not one!” This startling declaration, which demanded elaboration, is the foundation of The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria. The story of Boris III might have remained a historical footnote but for Sasha Wilson, the cowriter of the piece (with Joseph Cullen), whose grandparents escaped Bulgaria during World War II. It turns out that the history of Bulgaria in the 20th century is far more complicated than the Harmony passage suggests.
An underlying anxiety is on display in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal about the appeal of his absurdist play: exhibit A is a character listed as Audience Member in the program (Stephanie Berry), who interrupts the proceedings about 30 minutes into the show to offer a detailed explanation of why she is not pleased:
Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there? I’d happily watch a play about that—if it was different.
Take a stand! Inspire action! Touch our hearts—or at least you should try!
We’ve given this gift to you of our evening—one of our precious few nights on this earth—and you’re showing us this?????
Ben Target’s solo show Lorenzo is an end-of-life comedy that is both joyful and surprising. Written and performed by Target (pronounced Tar-ZHAY), and directed by Adam Brace and Lee Griffiths, it is an autobiographical 65 minutes that focuses on a time when Target gave up his work as a comedian to become a live-in caretaker for an aging family friend, “Uncle” Lorenzo Wong.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and performance-artist Taylor Mac, both recipients of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” and past finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are currently at the Signature Theatre for a revival of Ruhl’s 1998 adaptation of Orlando, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. Mac, who’s playing the title role, is renowned as a dramatist but, on this occasion, serves strictly as an actor.
Ephraim Birney, who plays the titular character in Joseph Dougherty’s Chester Bailey, mentions in his playbill bio that he “bears a striking resemblance to his co-star.” His co-star is the acclaimed theater actor Reed Birney, Ephraim’s father, and Ephraim is correct about the resemblance, not just in physical terms but also in talent: Chester Bailey showcases two fine actors in a play about trauma, delusion, and regret.
The come-hither title of Colt Coeur’s Dodi & Diana is essentially a bait-and-switch. For the most part, the characters in Kareem Fahmy’s two-hander are not the lovers whom one expects. They’re a married couple, Jason and Samira, who are well off and a bit New Age. Samira does kundalini, while Jason sees an astrologer, Vincent, who has told him that he and Samira are “astrological doubles” for Diana Spencer and her Muslim boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. Happily, Fahmy’s tricksy title masks a play that’s interesting and well-performed.
Just in time for Halloween, the Off-Off-Broadway troupe Bedlam is spicing up its presentation of Hedda Gabler with a Walpurgisnacht dance. That unexpected choreographic interpolation, with flashing lights, thump-y music, and Hellfire Club costumes, might strike the fancy of Sigmund Freud but would certainly surprise the play’s author, Henrik Ibsen—and perhaps also Jon Robin Baitz, whose adaptation, based on Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey’s translation, the production utilizes.
“The Stage Manager in Our Town must be gay. I mean, he spends all his time gossiping about everyone in town and rearranging furniture.” This is a funny line, stereotypes notwithstanding. It sounds like something you might hear from the quippy gay men in good comedies like Will & Grace or Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey.
Whether there will actually be any indictment remains highly speculative. But you might glean a modicum of excitement, and a laugh or three, from Indictment Excitement, the political standup fest now being presented at Theater 555, with a rotating roster of comics.
This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.
Feminists will undoubtedly rejoice at David Harms’s new play, Powerhouse, and its central character, a passionate and fearless lawyer in her prime who unapologetically speaks truth to power. Briskly directed by Ken Wolf, Powerhouse takes the complex subject of fraternization among coworkers out of the shadows and brings it into the daylight.
In 1930, the theater artist Neith Boyce was commissioned to adapt H. G. Wells’s 1901 fantasy novel The Sea Lady for the stage. After five years of work, and with a Broadway production planned, Wells’s agent rescinded the rights to the novel, and the play was never seen. For decades the manuscript resided at Yale’s Beinecke Library, until Boyce’s biographer sent it to the Metropolitan Playhouse, which is currently staging the play’s world premiere under the direction (and design) of the company’s artistic director, Alex Roe.
Maybe it’s the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the subsequent House Committee hearings this past summer, but the idea of fleeing to the Forest of Arden has rarely been so enticing. Directors often reinvent it as a rowdy retreat, replete with music and dance, but in Lynnea Benson’s production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Arden is mellow, soft, and dappled in sylvan light (created by Dennis Parichy).
Hospital waiting rooms are queasy yet strangely intimate spaces that have a way of whittling away pretense and revealing a person’s true self. Relationships with strangers can feel significant. Sensitive information about bodies is routinely, almost blithely, discussed. Gracie Gardner makes use of this fraught setting in I’m Revolting, which takes place in the waiting area of a skin-cancer clinic in New York City in 2019. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the play has flashes of excellence but never fully coheres or figures out what story, exactly, it is telling.
On Feb. 18, 1965, author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale) debated whether “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in England. The debate generated excitement and interest at the time—as described by historian Kevin Schultz, more than 700 (white) students showed up, and filled the room to overflowing. The face-off, reenacted in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, has since become legendary, the subject of books and documentaries, in particular because of Baldwin’s brilliant dissection of race in America, which continues to be painfully relevant today.
When the fourth season of the Netflix hit Stranger Things premiered this past summer, it seemed like the show’s popularity had reached its zenith. From pushing a certain decades-old Kate Bush song back onto the Billboard Hot 100 to causing fangirls to rave online about the magnetism of breakout star Jamie Campbell Bower as Stranger’s newest baddie, the show’s powerful reach could rival the telekinetic abilities of one of the series’ other iconic characters, Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). So it’s only natural that a musical parody of the show about superpowered teens, demonic beings and alternate dimensions would be the next step—here called Stranger Sings!, of course.
If you like political satire with a twist of espionage, look no further than Mark Wilding’s new play, Our Man in Santiago. Directed by Charlie Mount, this comic spy thriller, inspired by the failed U.S. attempt in the 1970s to depose Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected left-wing leader, can reawaken one to the spectacular misfires of American adventurism.
A woman walks over to a large flat-screen TV and, using the remote control, selects a karaoke track. Believe it or not, this is the start of a play set in occupied France in 1944: This Beautiful Future, directed by Jack Serio. That woman and her male counterpart—theater vets Angelina Fiordellisi and Austin Pendleton as characters named Angelina and Austin—are on stage for the entire 80-minute running time, but the story really centers on two teenagers: Otto, a German soldier stationed in Chartres in the summer of ’44, and Elodie, a local girl. They’re both painfully naive. She thinks her Jewish neighbors will eventually come home; he’s psyched to march into England and anticipates a quick British surrender.
David Strathairn, whose stellar career as a character actor has spanned decades, gives a brilliant, riveting solo performance in Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. Playing a Pole who experienced the Holocaust, he draws on historical evidence and the testimony that playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman employ in their portrait of a righteous and desperate man determined to prevent the annihilation of his country’s Jews. This is the real-life Karski, humble, modest, and painfully aware of what he could do, and more so of what he could not do, to save them.
It is perhaps sign of these pandemic times that several Off-Broadway plays opening in the coming weeks all deal with severe illness. Manhattan Theater Club will stage Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, featuring a character with cerebral palsy. At the Atlantic, Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting is set in a skin-cancer clinic, and next month the Roundabout offers a work by Noah Diaz with the on-the-nose title, You Will Get Sick. But first, the Yonder Window Theatre Company gives us Jasper, a thought-provoking drama in which a boy with a fatal illness tests the limits of his caring parents.
Early in Carol Buggé’s new comedy-drama, Strings Attached, one of the author’s characters name-checks British writer Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, about an actual 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Danish capital. Buggé’s reference is a two-edged sword: her own work doesn’t come close to Frayn’s, but it does indicate that she has a passion and knowledge of physics that she wants to share with audiences. Frayn’s treatment is a rare instance of making science dramatically interesting, but Buggé’s overstuffed play is less viable.
Echoing through the halls and into the New Ohio Theatre’s performance space is My Onliness, a daring new experimental work co-produced by the collective One-Eighth Theater, the New Ohio Theatre, and IRT Theater. Written by New Ohio’s artistic director, Robert Lyons, My Onliness takes elements inspired by Polish dramatist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and transforms them into what One-Eighth declares as the New Absurd. And wonderfully absurd it is.
Following in the footsteps of the 2013 Tony winner for Best Musical, this polished, Off-Broadway revival of Kinky Boots shines under the direction and choreography of Jerry Mitchell, who helmed that Broadway production, and stars Callum Francis, recreating the role of the drag queen, Lola, after having previously donned the titillating titular zip-ups on Broadway as well as in London and Australia.
Near the opening of Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis, Colin Mochrie refers to himself as “international comic icon,” but if you haven’t ever seen What’s My Line, Anyway? you might be skeptical of his sweeping claim. (Mochrie’s wry delivery suggests that the description is a bit of a spoof.) Nevertheless, the Canadian native is definitely the funnier half of Hyprov, which combines two disciplines into something unusual and raucously entertaining.
