In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.
It’s a fallacy that addiction can be cured by a stint in rehab. Anyone celebrating sobriety can affirm that the process of recovery takes decades—and is often lifelong. Nevertheless, a rehab experience can trigger a life-changing awakening. This unpredictable process is at the center of Spike Manton and Harry Teinowtiz’s Another Shot, a poignant exploration of Teinowitz’s alcoholism and treatment. Director Jackson Gay keeps the play teetering between denial and acceptance, and between comedy and tragedy.
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.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
It can’t have been easy to have polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin for a father—talk about expectations. In Lloyd Suh’s Franklinland, a comic rendering of the relationship between Franklin and his son William, Franklin is portrayed by the superb Thomas Jay Ryan, who captures perfectly Suh’s conception of the character as conceited, brilliant, and callous. Franklin himself knows this, and uses his own outsized reputation as a cudgel against his somewhat bumbling offspring.
“Do you all eat grapes?” James Hindman asks, proffering a bowl of green grapes at the outset of his one-man show, What Doesn’t Kill You, directed by Suzanne Barabas, artistic director of the New Jersey Repertory Company, where this show began its theatrical life. And while Hindman perhaps doesn’t want anyone to leap to their feet and grab a grape, this kind of seemingly non-rhetorical question is part of the audience intimacy he develops throughout the piece (and indeed some audience members did call out at various prompts, though no one took a grape). Hindman’s friendly, casual style establishes rapport, and once everyone is comfortable, he becomes a tour guide on his personal journey into and out of a New Jersey hospital, after suffering the kind of heart attack that one nurse refers to as the “widow maker.”
The title of Erika Sheffer’s new play refers to the most famous Vladimir in the world at the moment—Russia’s president. Unlike Peter Morgan’s recent Patriots, however, Valdimir Putin doesn’t appear in Sheffer’s ambitious drama, although he casts a long shadow over the characters. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the play, with its foreign setting and journalistic protagonists, shares a kinship with David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda (1985)—it’s a worthy cousin to that work.
Neither the script nor the program for People of the Book states when the play takes place, so presumably it is the present. That makes Yussef El Guindi's drama not only morally and logically confused but dated as well. It treats the fight against the Iraqi insurgency, a U.S. military action that ceased about a decade ago, as a current event.
David Finnigan’s performance piece on the climate crisis, Deep History, now playing at the Public Theater after stops elsewhere, including the Edinburgh Fringe, will inevitably be compared to a TED talk: Finnigan is scientifically fluent and uses images from his laptop (video design by Hayley Egan) to craft a deeply informed narrative of climate and human history, with some autobiography and whimsy mixed in. TED talks can be engaging, of course, and Finnigan is certainly that; but this description also sells Finnigan short. There is theatricality at work in the 65-minute piece, directed by Annette Mees, particularly a twist in the storytelling that revolves around the gap between 2019 (when the piece was written) and the time when it is performed.
Tina Packer’s Women of Will is meant to be an educational performance piece that explores Shakespeare’s trajectory as a writer through the lens of his female characters, diving into issues of gender and power. The piece has had various productions over the years and was published as a book in 2015 (subtitled Understanding Shakespeare’s Female Characters). Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, who has directed the show before, now directs what he has referred to as Women of Will 2.0, for a limited engagement at the West End Theatre.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
Director David Cromer has the ability to conjure expansive worlds from small, banal settings: For Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter, the set (designed with remarkable detail by Walt Spangler) occupies only a part of the space available on the stage of Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. As he did with A Case for the Existence of God at Signature Theatre, Cromer encloses the characters in order to open them up. Of course, in order to perform this low-key magic, there must be sharply drawn, deeply human characters to work with.
It’s no surprise that the Trump era and its aftermath have been a boon to documentary plays. These plays don’t all address explicitly political topics, and they vary widely from one another in tone, method, and approach; but hovering over this era’s documentary plays is the relentless assault being waged on the idea of truth, on the very nature of reality itself, and the uncertainty over whether our society and institutions will persevere.
Meet your new mother-in-law, Beiv (Kate Mulgrew): she’s Ireland’s “great feminist artist” who lives on a remote island off the coast of West Cork, has an acerbic wit and an imperious manner, a penchant for knocking down the walls of her house, a strained relationship with her son, and may have murdered her husband. Oh, and she didn’t know her son was married until you showed up with him from San Francisco. This is the situation that 23-year-old Bonnie (Ayana Workman) finds herself in at the outset of Nancy Harris’s overstuffed mystery The Beacon, which was commissioned by Druid Theatre Company and now arrives at the Irish Rep after a 2019 run at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
Arlene Hutton’s abortion-rights drama Blood of the Lamb arrives at an unusually timely moment. In the last few days NBC News has reported that maternal deaths in Texas increased 56% between 2019 and 2022, a period that includes the 2021 ban on abortion care in the state. Although Margot Bordelon says in her director’s note that the play began as a work of “speculative fiction,” the serendipity is a boon. The underlying story feels alarmingly real.
When the program comes with a glossary, that can be a trouble sign. The glossary for The Witness Room, Pedro Antonio Garcia’s drama-with-some-laughs, runs to three pages. So much legalese—J-D Redcap, Three and a C, Chomo—how much will an audience member be able to understand? And for the first several minutes, it’s a struggle to figure out what the heck’s going on in set designer Daniel Allen’s cluttered witness room. Stick around, though, and the narrative becomes clearer. And what follows is a compelling peek into the lives and interactions of NYPD cops, their legal maneuverings in pretrial, and how slippery their moral code can get.
Matthew Freeman’s play The Ask seems deceptively simple on the surface and remains so for quite a while. Two women are meeting in an Upper West Side apartment. The older woman is a well-known photographer, and coffee-table art books (Alice Neel, e.g.) lie on the floor of her apartment; photographs (by Cindy Sherman, among others) adorn the walls. Craig Napoliello’s impressively detailed set evokes solid wealth—the reason the younger woman is paying a call.
Life and Trust, a new theatrical event from Emursive, which produced the Punchdrunk hit Sleep No More, takes as its inspiration the Faust legend and mixes it with the 1929 stock market crash, the structure of A Christmas Carol, and glimmers of Citizen Kane. As with Sleep No More, attendees wear masks and performers do not, and silence is the rule. The audience, too, plays a part: The evening begins in a cavernous lobby with red-marble columns at “Conwell Tower” (formerly City Bank–Farmers Trust), half a block from Delmonico’s in lower Manhattan. A placard announces the date, Oct. 23, 1929, and the event: Life and Trust Bank’s Prospective Investors’ Fête. The audience is the “investors.”
Technology is being used more, and more inventively, in scenic and production design for the theater. Social media has become a vital part of marketing—and occasionally casting—shows. But tech has yet to make a big impression in theater as a subject. Three decades into the 21st century, plays about life in the digital age are still scarce. (Maybe that’s why Job, which recently transferred to Broadway, hit a nerve.)
Perhaps the first thing to clarify about Odd Man Out is that Martín Bondone’s play is unrelated to the 1947 movie by British director Carol Reed that starred James Mason as a robber on the run in Belfast. Although Reed’s work is a famous film noir, Bondone’s Odd Man Out is more than noir—it’s performed in total darkness.
Considering it has a cast of two, The Meeting: The Interpreter is a very busy production. The actors, Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, move all over the stage—standing here, kneeling there, spinning around in wheeled chairs, dancing a little—and Curran, who plays multiple characters, repeatedly switches her costume or wig. Video, puppets, sound effects and a slew of props are also part of the action.
Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.