At the outset of Ife Olujobi’s Jordans, a surreal comic-horror satire of racial capitalism and its effects on Black bodies, Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), a Black receptionist at a fashionable event space/production facility, essentially builds the stylish, gleaming set (designed by Matt Saunders). This activity is one of many moments in director Whitney White’s sleek production when Jordan’s unceasing labor in the face of disregard or outright hostility from her all-white co-workers is highlighted. Later, when Jordan’s colleague Emma (Brontë England-Nelson) says in a presentation to their wicked boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), that the women at the firm are “slaving away,” she explicitly does not include Jordan in her statement.
The title of Lia Romeo’s play Still, it must be clarified, is unrelated to manufacturing moonshine in the mountains of Appalachia. Rather, her wistful two-hander is about seniors reconnecting—the kind of story that pops up periodically in bridal pages about two spouses whose longtime partners have died and who have somehow reconnected with their youthful heartthrobs. The stories carry an inherent charm, one that is aided immeasurably by two superb performers, Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly.
In addition to introducing the word robot to the English language, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi drama R.U.R. depicted a dystopian world in which scientifically manufactured laborers gradually eradicate humans. The play perfectly captured the anxieties of the burgeoning Machine Age and was a big hit on Broadway in 1922. S. Asher Gelman’s Scarlett Dreams attempts to tap into similar uneasiness as the former Information Age settles into the current Age of Intelligence. With the meteoric advancement and sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), the play suggests that it may be just a matter of time when people will be controlled by digital avatars, and the difference between reality and virtual reality (VR) will become purely conjectural.
Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in the 1960s by Irish playwright Brian Friel, poignantly captures the anticipation, fear, and excitement of emigrating to a new place. Set on the eve of departure, Friel’s play focuses on Gar, the would-be émigré, in both his Public self (played with subdued melancholy by David McElwee) as he struggles with his decision to leave, and his Private self (played with exuberance by A.J. Shively), screaming to get out. It’s deadly boring in Ballybeg, a tiny little corner of County Donegal, Ireland, where the most exciting things are a game of checkers and memories of teenage shenanigans.
Theatergoers yearning to see a new spin on Macbeth need look no further than Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing). Written and directed by Harris, it is a feminist version of Shakespeare’s original that puts Lady Macbeth at its center. But while Harris succeeds in expanding Lady Macbeth’s presence in the story, ultimately the playwright is defeated in increasing the character’s agency, given Shakespeare’s clear-cut trajectory of the doomed Queen.
Donja R. Love’s new play, One in Two, captures the truth, humor, pain, love and realism of being a full-fledged human: specifically a black, gay or bisexual man living with HIV. It’s a beautiful, albeit graphic, story of Donté, a community, a life—many lives.
Lucas Hnath, recently represented on Broadway by the spun-from-fact Hillary and Clinton, and soon to be represented at the Vineyard by Dana H., a story drawn from family experience, is cleansing his theatrical palate between them with The Thin Place, a story of the afterlife that conjures up the eerie worlds of Conor McPherson and M.R. James. The dedication to Ricky Jay, the late magician, indicates Hnath is out to perform his own sleight of hand with a deeply unsettling ghost story.
Toward the end of Harry Townsend’s Last Stand, a play that’s set in a New England lake house and revolves around the strained relationship between an aging father and his adult child, a door is opened and the call of a loon is heard. It immediately brings to mind On Golden Pond (“The loons, Norman!”), a play that’s set in a New England lake house and revolves around the strained relationship between an aging father and his adult child. This association doesn’t do Harry Townsend any favors, though, since its parent-child relationship is not as well developed as the one in On Golden Pond and, consequently, the conflict and emotions feel forced.
Be prepared for an evening of delight at Anything Can Happen in the Theater, a revue that features the music and lyrics of acclaimed Broadway composer Maury Yeston. The numbers, primarily chosen from Yeston’s shows—Nine, Grand Hotel, Titanic, and In the Beginning—run the gamut from whimsical, poignant, upbeat, and celebratory to seductive, satirical, and altogether charming.
It’s possible that The Wild Parrots of Campbell, set in a suburb of San Jose, may well call to mind the 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Whether the parrots in the film have by now migrated to the South Bay is not a concern of playwright Alex Riad’s blistering nuclear-family drama. They’re a side note in a work that doesn’t have ornithology on its mind.
We are all connected. Nothing is random; things happen for a reason. Be nice to your siblings. These are some ideas one might discern from Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee, but to say the play is a reflection on these—or any other—themes would be far too generous to this massive misfire that tells three different stories, with barely a sentence of realistic-sounding dialogue among them.
Not so much a “he said/she said” as a “he pontificates,” MsTrial marks the playwriting debut of Dep Kirkland, a former prosecutor who obviously has insights to share about the legal system. It’s ironic, then, that a scene set during a legal proceeding is where the play goes awry.
If ever there was a film that deserved to be satirized, it is the 14 men meet 13 women across 10 subplots glorification of romantic, platonic and familial love known as Love Actually. Why it took 16 years for a work such as Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody to arrive on the scene is anybody’s guess, but the timing is right in at least one aspect. ’Tis the season when quirky Christmas musicals dot the Off-Broadway landscape, and this one, with its many flings being flung across five weeks of winter, is as full of holiday cheer as it is overflowing with whirlwind performances and witty pop-culture shout-outs.
Stephen Brown’s Everything Is Super Great presents a group of likable, oddball, and somewhat hapless characters who don’t really fit in anywhere in the suburban Texas world they inhabit, but bond with one another amid unexpected circumstances. The word “great” works in the play as a form of deliberate denial, but also something genuinely hopeful: life is a series of vexations, large and small, for everyone on stage, and yet the characters, and the play itself, search for little moments of meaning and connection.
The sad history of radioactive relationships must, by definition, begin with Marie Curie, the woman who coined the term “radioactivity.” In 1911 the widowed madame had an affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of her late husband. The ensuing scandal, which was uncovered concurrently with the awarding of her second Nobel Prize, nearly cost her her reputation. And while this heated dalliance drives the story in Lauren Gunderson’s instructive new work, The Half-Life of Marie Curie, it is framed by another of Curie’s relationships, the platonic friendship she shared with the electrical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton.
Albert Einstein may be best remembered for hard scientific theories—but a new musical is exposing the humanity that lies beneath the formulas. Directed by Cara Reichel and based on a novel by Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams offers a cerebral exploration into one of history’s most brilliant minds.
Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, a new play by Liza Birkenmeier, is an intriguing slice of life set on a St. Louis rooftop on Friday, June 23, 1983, the night before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. If younger members of today’s LGBTQ community often take for granted the plight of their elders, Birkenmeier’s play bravely imagines what it was like when being gay involved claustrophobic secrets, blind struggle and a stepping into the void to create a reality without social or cultural precedence.
Like The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels, Richard Nelson’s new play, The Michaels, focuses on a family in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a destination that has become for this playwright what Idaho is for the dramatist Samuel D. Hunter. In Rhinebeck, Nelson finds a microcosm of American life, although his primary structural models are clearly the plays of Anton Chekhov. Nelson has had a hand in translating three plays by the Russian master, and Chekhov’s influence is evident in the quotidian concerns of the earlier families as well as this one: it’s the first in a third cycle.
In One Discordant Violin, the music and narration are central to the story, sometimes complimenting each other and at other times riffing on one another. Adapted by Yann Martel (Life of Pi) from his own short story, the play follows the adventure of a single narrator whose journey provokes a meditation on the meaning of life, the Vietnam War, Trump, the real estate mogul, Joseph Conrad’s stories and fastidious use of punctuation, and the lost dreams of youth.
The setting of BrandoCapote, the multimedia performance piece currently playing at the Tank, is a room at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. It is the location in which Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando in 1957 when the star was filming Sayonara. The play hopscotches from 1957 to 2004, the year Brando died, and the hotel also represents, as the program explains, purgatory.
The New Group playbill says Cyrano is “adapted by Erica Schmidt from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.” Schmidt is a distinguished mid-career stage director and author of All the Fine Boys, a gritty, unsettling 2017 drama which, like Cyrano, was given its New York City premiere by The New Group. As “adaptor,” Schmidt has dismantled Rostand’s 1897 masterpiece, reassembling a few of its elements as a streamlined libretto with a prevailing tone of melancholy.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
Enchanted April has been around longer than you think. If you know the title, it’s probably as a 1991 prestige picture, with Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, and a small cast soaking up the Tuscan sun. But it’s based on an old, old novel by one Elizabeth von Arnim, turned first into a 1925 stage comedy, then a 1935 RKO vehicle that did Ann Harding no favors, then the 1991 remake, then a second, enjoyable stage adaptation by Matthew Barber in 2003. All along, it’s curious nobody saw a musical in it: The lush setting, several love stories, and singable emotions might have been ripe material for, say, a 1954 Lerner and Loewe opus. Which is essentially what the adapters Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Michael Perry (music and lyrics) have attempted—a radically old-fashioned romantic musical.
Despite the title, Barbara Hammond’s futuristic drama Terra Firma is ironically on shaky ground. Having its world premiere at Baruch Performing Arts College, the play is set on an abandoned platform of a country that experience a “Big War” some 50 years earlier. There, three characters have abandoned the mainland and commandeered the site. Sporadically there are explosions on shore—the conflict is apparently not over, or is it?
Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season is being promoted as a “demented romantic comedy,” and it certainly is that—and more. After two years of development at All for One Theater, where Vieh is an artist in residence, and a recent world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Monsoon Season is a strange, funny, and haunting piece, which depicts, with wit and pathos, two lives careening out of control, and yet never takes a condescending or mocking attitude toward its characters.
