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.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
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.
Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s new musical Teeth has bite. Adapted from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 cult horror-comedy film of the same name and directed by Sarah Benson, Teeth is a tongue-in-cheek look at sex, shame, religious repression, and more. The story revolves around a devout evangelical teen named Dawn who discovers she has a secret weapon: vagina dentata (Latin for “toothed vagina”), which swings into action when she is sexually threatened.
The Soho Rep had been staging vital productions out of its small Walker Street theater in Tribeca for a quarter century when it was discovered, in 2016, that the company had been in violation of an occupancy limit of 70 people. Through a combination of fund-raising and city agency support, the company has now returned to its home space, which includes a new fire-safety system. It is a fitting improvement, because flames are the essential metaphor of Aleshea Harris’s explosive Is God Is. In this allegorical tale of vengeance and family honor, twin sisters, burned both literally and figuratively, create an inferno that swallows nearly everyone they meet.
