The Axis Theatre Company’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is something to celebrate. Directed by Randall Sharp, and superbly performed by a 12-member ensemble cast, this Twelfth Night is a wild and wonderful romp through Illyria.
Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
October 7: A Verbatim Play by Phelim McAleers depicts events in the Gaza Envelope of southwest Israel on the day of last year’s attack by the Islamist organization Hamas. It’s based on interviews conducted by McAleers and his wife, journalist-filmmaker Ann McElhinnie, immediately after the siege that reportedly killed 1,200 people, wounded an estimated 5,400, and resulted in seizure by Hamas of more than 250 hostages. In a May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, President Joe Biden lamented that, eight months after the assault (and despite ongoing warfare in Israel and Gaza), “people are already forgetting” the brutality of that day. McAleer’s play is agitprop against forgetfulness, burning a sense of the day’s agony into playgoers’ imaginations.
It’s I’m Not Rappaport meets Waiting for Godot meets The Gin Game! Take two old codgers on a park bench, combine with existential meanderings in a fixed setting, season with the ravages of aging, and you have Just Another Day, Dan Lauria’s uncertain reflection on all three components (but especially the third). Just Another Day suffers from being too much—well, just another day. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and a great deal of curiously multisyllabic palaver fills out the hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. But it does have two actors very much worth seeing, for Lauria has cast himself, and opposite him, a flawless Patty McCormack.
Summer means free theater in New York, and Molière in the Park, an organization co-founded by Lucie Tiberghien and Garth Belcon. The Miser becomes the third free production at LeFrak Center, following The Misanthrope (2022) and Tartuffe (2023). Directed by Tiberghien, it’s an invigorating new version of the French playwright’s 1668 satire.
Bess Wohl’s new comedy Make Believe portrays a quartet of Gen-X siblings at two points of life-changing family crisis. The first is in 1980, when the Conlees, two sisters and two brothers, are small children. The second is 32 years later. In both instances, the kids are gathered—it’s tempting to say “barricaded”—in a gargantuan nursery at the top of their parents’ luxe suburban home.
Director Sam Gold, still draped in laurels from the Broadway premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2, is exorcising demons of cliché and supposition from Shakespeare’s most frequently staged tragedy. Gold’s Juilliard contemporary Oscar Isaac stars in this reimagined Hamlet, a revenge tragedy that is arguably the greatest drama in the language.
