Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs is a meditation on sobriety and female friendship. It unfolds within a women’s and trans-inclusive alcohol-recovery group dubbed the Saturday Survivors, a nod to the day of the week they meet over coffee, scones, and doughnuts in a bland, white, windowless community room with folding chairs (scenic design by dots). Under Les Waters’s direction, the 70-minute play, which features a remarkable ensemble of actors, slides from a naturalistic mode into an experimental one, as time and identity are upended. The experiment, however, proves frustratingly vague rather than provocative.
The setting for the Theatre for a New Audience’s production of The Tragedy of Coriolanus is “just after now.” Teeming with multimedia elements, including combat surveillance footage, a four-sided video screen suspended above the stage, and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the conceit effectively mirrors how contemporary politics and war are manipulated by selective images and social media. The drawback to this interpretation is that the volatile relationship between the ruling elite and the common people, so central to Shakespeare’s play, feels elusive and out-of-reach in this nominally futuristic world.
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is the ostensible subject of Ngozi Anyanwu’s taut two-hander The Monsters, now running Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club after a fall stint at Two River Theater in New Jersey—but the play’s true combat is emotional. Beyond the excellent choreography and fight direction (by Rickey Tripp and Gerry Rodriguez, respectively), the deeper exhilaration stems from seeing two actors, Aigner Mizzelle as Lil and Okieriete Onaodowan as her big brother Big, deliver beautifully realized performances.
Hold On to Your Butts, directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, proves that epic spectacle can be conjured from little more than bodies, sound effects, and boundless imagination, as two actors and a sound-effects artist recreate Jurassic Park shot for shot, live onstage. The result is an exuberant collision of physical comedy, sound, and affectionate parody—a love letter to both movies and theater.
Not Nobody, written by Brian Dykstra, is a play about ethics and the legal system. Under the direction of Margaret Perry, the work centers on McAlester Daly (Dykstra himself), a former ethics professor. One evening, he is out walking when a couple of cops—Officer Ricketts (Sheffield Chastain, who deftly plays a wide range of characters) and Officer Chavana (Kathiamarice Lopez, who brings a crispness to every role she plays)—stop him. He’s in a neighborhood where a middle-aged white guy typically wouldn’t be, and the cops find that odd.
June is typically the month for many gay-themed plays to open, taking advantage of the influx of tourists for the annual Gay Pride Parade. Such works almost invariably feature gratuitous male nudity and forgettable plots, but S. Asher Gelman has set the bar far higher with his first play, Afterglow.
