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.
Jonathan Spector’s This Much I Know is an erudite, ambitious, and wide-ranging play in the vein of Tom Stoppard. Three actors play dozens of parts, spanning nationalities and time periods; historical events and personages alternate with the everyday problems of people trying to navigate 21st-century life; and questions of cognition, epistemology, and politics are interrogated.
Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, tautly directed by Matt Torney at the Irish Rep, probes memory, violence, and reckoning in Belfast. What begins as a seemingly ordinary night in 1979 reverberates across decades, forcing one soldier to confront the shadows of his past.
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.
This is pretty high-profile stuff for La MaMa, and a far more elaborate production than their norm: A major stage performer and a noted film actor in a new play by a well-known movie and TV actor. And Then We Were No More, by Tim Blake Nelson, thrusts the audience into a depressing future that may not be far off—but one that feels more familiar, what with the surfeit of apocalyptic and otherwise downbeat futuristic dramas flooding the marketplace, than Nelson likely intended.
It was the summer of 1947, and Tennessee Williams needed a man—a leading man, that is, for his newest work, a feral little melodrama called A Streetcar Named Desire. Veteran film star John Garfield was the top contender for the part, but as posited in Kowalski, Gregg Ostrin’s seductive, and occasionally true new play, a 23-year-old Marlon Brando won the role of Stanley over the course of a single, drink-filled evening at Williams’s bungalow in Provincetown, Mass.
Ken Ludwig, who’s generally out to make his audiences laugh a lot and not think too hard (Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, Crazy for You), strikes a more mellow and reflective tone than usual with his latest, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, at 59E59. An epistolary lark, it shares some traits with Pen Pals, still puttering away at St. Clement’s: two characters, a deepening relationship between them, lots of letters, punctuated by dialogue. Again, though, the audience doesn’t have to think too hard: Dear Jack, Dear Louise is friendly and diverting, but it sure is light.
Creative teams that turn popular movies into musicals are becoming commonplace on Broadway, but as Radio Downtown: Radical '70s Artists Live on Air demonstrates, it takes a rare breed of creator to unearth a collection of decades-old public radio interviews and transform them into a viable piece of Off-Broadway theater. Fortunately, Steve Cosson is just such a visionary.
The cover photo of Stagelight, the playbill for Mindplay, shows Vinny DePonto, its star (and co-writer, with Josh Koenigsberg) with a swarthy, tight-lipped, foreboding visage. He might easily have just emerged from a coffin in Transylvania, but, thankfully, on stage DePonto is engaging, earnest and unthreatening. In explaining the raison d’être of his show, he mentions his own anxieties, including being subject to panic attacks. “Your mind takes over your body if you’re one of those people,” he says. “I’m one of those people.”
Blind Runner, written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani, features only two actors. Set in Iran, the play is about a husband (Mohammed Reza Hosseinzadeh) and wife (Ainaz Azarhoush) who now only meet during prison visiting hours. Neither has an actual name. Wife is serving a sentence for something she posted on social media. Although it’s not specific, there is a suggestion she showed support for women who protested the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by the Guidance Patrol, a type of morality police. The post alters the lives of the couple.
This production has transferred to the Women’s Project Theater (2162 Broadway at 76th) and will run through Jan. 19. For tickets and more information, visit mrssternwanders.com.
Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
