Reviews

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Still

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Still

At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”

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Henry IV

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Henry IV

The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

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B*tchcraft

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B*tchcraft

Of all the productions opening Off-Broadway this season, B*tchcraft may well be the most bewitching. With music and lyrics written by Bitch, and book by her and Margie Zohn, who also directs, it’s a wild journey into how Bitch, a quiet girl from suburban Michigan, shed her chrysalis to become the queer icon that she is today.

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After Endgame

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After Endgame

Kevin James Doyle has a good story to tell in his solo show After Endgame—along with several engaging digressions. But none of it has to do with performing in the play Endgame by Samuel Beckett. The endgame of the title is the last third of a chess match, Doyle explains. “Blunders typically happen in the endgame,” he warns, when only a few pieces remain on the board.

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Night Sings Its Songs

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Night Sings Its Songs

Night Sings Its Songs is a rare opportunity to see a play by Jon Fosse, the Norwegian winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fosse’s 1997 play is centered on a married couple, named only Young Man and Young Woman. From the outset it’s clear they are having marital difficulties. Young Man (Kyle Cameron) is unhappy and apathetic, while Young Woman is dissatisfied in her marriage and feeling stuck. They have a baby who periodically cries.

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My Man Kono

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My Man Kono

With My Man Kono, now premiering at Pan Asian Repertory, playwright Philip W. Chung has an interesting story to tell. He tells it dutifully, thoroughly, and for the most part clearly. But not excitingly. Chung has done his research. His title character, Toraichi Kono (Brian Lee Huynh), was a Japanese immigrant who made it to the United States in the early 20th century and rose to a position of relative wealth and importance, then saw his fortunes dramatically reverse.

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Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology

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Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology

Playing at the Soho Playhouse as part of the Fringe Encore series, Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology is a heartfelt tribute of spoken-word and musical performance full of angst and warmth, lovingly hosted by his daughter Gia Scott-Heron. Gil Scott-Heron, who died in 2011, was a spoken-word artist and musician, and the show presents 17 of his works from a career that extended from 1970 through 2010. Bluesology is how he described his work—he saw himself as “a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues.”

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Anywhere

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Anywhere

Moody and mysterious, Anywhere—a co-presentation by the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry program—might cast a spell on viewers, or thoroughly baffle them. Or both. Anybody who goes to see it expecting a “puppet show” is in for a surprise. It is far more somber and cerebral than what one thinks of as typical puppet fare. One of its two characters is portrayed by a human, and though it runs less than an hour, Anywhere is a complex production in terms of its human-scale scenic, lighting and sound design. 

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My First Ex-Husband

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My First Ex-Husband

In the same vein as Love, Loss, and What I Wore—but with a different theme—My First Ex-Husband features a rotating cast of female celebrities performing monologues based on real-life stories. The initial four-person cast includes The View’s Joy Behar, who created My First Ex-Husband. At the top of the show, Behar explains that out of curiosity she started asking divorcées she knows about the reasons behind their breakups.

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The Antiquities

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The Antiquities

Stories on stage and screen that engage with, critique, or warn about artificial intelligence (AI) are as much in vogue as AI itself. McNeal, about art and AI, recently concluded its Broadway run; We Are Your Robots and Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience addressed collective veneration of the technology Off-Broadway; and Companion, a twisted and funny exploration of human and nonhuman desire, opened this month in movie theaters. Now, Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, an episodic look at our current technological moment—or precipice—through the artificial eyes of the future, enters the AI discourse at Playwrights Horizons (co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre).

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Beckett Briefs

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Beckett Briefs

Beckett Briefs, the rubric for three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre, provides a rare look at works by the dramatist whose Waiting for Godot has overshadowed all theater since the mid-20th-century. The progression of plays devised by director Ciarán Hinds moves from the slightest, Not I, featuring only a mouth speaking, to Play, in which only three heads appear, to the longest, and most fruitfully theatrical, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, head to toe. All three works are suffused with regrets about or outrage at the setbacks, blunders, jealousy, and dishonesty in the characters’ lives.

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A Knock on the Roof

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A Knock on the Roof

On a daily basis, news feeds and media broadcasts are saturated with reports, images, and updated statistics about the brutal destruction in Gaza. After a while, even when there is a pause in the attacks and counterattacks, the repeated and constant exposure can numb one’s emotional response and make it harder to feel empathy for those directly affected. Writer and performer Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof notably highlights the real human suffering caused by war, while also challenging audiences to contemplate how they would cope with such ever-present trauma.

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Cymbeline

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Cymbeline

Although the all-Asian, all-female production of Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline by the National American Asian Theatre Company (NAATCO) doesn’t succeed on all dramatic fronts, it’s brimming with vitality. It draws on fairy-tale elements, including a wicked queen, an unscrupulous villain, a wronged hero, and an extended scene of revelations that give it the aura of a fairy tale. Cymbeline perhaps can best be summed up as a myth of national origin that reveals how the British and Roman heritages came together under its ancient, peace-loving title character.  

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Kowalski

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Kowalski

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.

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Dear Jack, Dear Louise

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Dear Jack, Dear Louise

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.

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Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air

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Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air

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.

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Mindplay

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Mindplay

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.”

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Blind Runner

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Blind Runner

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.

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Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library

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Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library

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.

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A Guide for the Homesick

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A Guide for the Homesick

For a while in Ken Urban’s play A Guide for the Homesick, the author’s subject seems predictable. Set in Amsterdam, near Schiphol airport, the two-hander opens with a tall, strapping black man named Teddy (McKinley Belcher III) inviting a younger, white backpacker into his room. They’ve just met at a hotel bar, where the backpacker, Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger), has missed his flight. Teddy offers his guest a beer and a floor to sleep on, but the situation vibrates with sexual tension.

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