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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dream Feed, currently at HERE, is a poetic meditation on the theme of dreams. Performed by the two-time Grammy Award–winning theatrical family band the HawtPlates (Jade Hicks, Justin Hicks, and Kenita Miller-Hicks), the production utilizes sound and song to bring subconscious ideas to the surface.
The Disappear feels like an incomplete puzzle: Its pieces don’t fit together. This new play, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, is overloaded with undercooked melodramatics and ideas.
A work that has been collaboratively devised by members of the Happenstance Theater troupe, Juxtapose | A Theatrical Shadow Box cites as its influences the artworks of Joseph Cornell and the French films Amélie (2001) and Mon Oncle (1958). The play, directed by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Selma Mandell, explores randomness and dissimilarity and focuses on the lives of tenants in a French apartment house through a series of scenes that can be identified from their artistic influences or simply enjoyed as charming vignettes arranged in visually striking tableaux. Either way, the result is a multilayered and curious work that is both thought-provoking and delightful.
Bob Marley: How Reggae Changed the World is a soulful solo journey that traces reggae’s roots and its global reverberations through the life and legacy of its most iconic figure. Written, performed, and directed by Duane Forrest, the show blends acoustic music, personal storytelling, and audience connection, allowing one to glimpse how Bob Marley’s message reshaped not only a genre, but lives.
