Colin Macdonald

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Jordans

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Jordans

At the outset of Ife Olujobi’s Jordans, a surreal comic-horror satire of racial capitalism and its effects on Black bodies, Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), a Black receptionist at a fashionable event space/production facility, essentially builds the stylish, gleaming set (designed by Matt Saunders). This activity is one of many moments in director Whitney White’s sleek production when Jordan’s unceasing labor in the face of disregard or outright hostility from her all-white co-workers is highlighted. Later, when Jordan’s colleague Emma (Brontë England-Nelson) says in a presentation to their wicked boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), that the women at the firm are “slaving away,” she explicitly does not include Jordan in her statement.

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Grief Hotel

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Grief Hotel

Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel was part of Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks program, and now comes to the Public Theater for a more extended engagement. This is great news, because the play very much deserves a longer look and wider audience. It is presented in partnership with New Georges, who produce “weird, weird-ish, and often impossible plays”; Grief Hotel is weird—gloriously so—but it’s not impossible. In fact, the strength of the play lies in Birkenmeier’s canny creation of an offbeat yet accessible style, thanks to her sharp ear for dialogue that is fundamentally naturalistic and works in productive combination with the play’s slightly surreal, collage-like structure, directed with bracing clarity by Tara Ahmadinejad.

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The Effect

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The Effect

Lucy Prebble’s The Effect was first staged in 2012, presented at Barrow Street Theatre in the Village in 2016, and then revived at London’s National Theatre in 2023. That revival now comes to the Shed. It is a psychopharmacological love story: Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie (Taylor Russell) are participants in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant, overseen by Dr. Lorna James (Michele Austin). Tristan is an extroverted working-class Londoner from Hackney with a mix of confidence and self-deprecation, while Connie is a more tightly wound, introverted psychology student whose participation in the study is apparently less about getting paid than about intellectual interest.

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Sunset Baby

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Sunset Baby

Sunset Baby begins with Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), a legend of the Black Liberation Movement who has spent time in prison for robbing an armored truck, speaking hesitantly into a camcorder—the video feed is projected above the stage—about the uncertainties of fatherhood: “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable.” Just how complicated it is in his particular case is soon revealed when he tries to reunite with his estranged daughter, Nina (Moses Ingram), a woman who has built a hard, protective shell around herself and does not want to hear a whiff of nostalgia from a man she barely knows. She doesn’t even want Kenyatta to say her name: “Do not say my name as if you’ve said it a hundred times. As if we have this familiarity between us. We are not familiar. We are not close.”

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The Apiary

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The Apiary

A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.

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Russian Troll Farm

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Russian Troll Farm

Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm at the Vineyard Theatre is a nightmare version of an office sitcom, set during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Quirky worker bees perform evil tasks while navigating interpersonal relationships and an ever-present authoritarian state looming over them, in the form of Vladimir Putin’s portrait on the wall and an armed soldier keeping watch. The professional Internet trolls in St. Petersburg, at the benignly named Internet Research Agency, send out vast numbers of tweets and posts using fake accounts—a “mix of celebrities, eggs, fake individuals, and pundits”—to disseminate misinformation. In almost every case, Gancher uses real Russian troll tweets, a documentary reality that makes the set-up even more nightmarish.

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The Connector

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The Connector

The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.

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Aristocrats

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Aristocrats

Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is often described as “Chekhovian,” and, indeed, the parallels to The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are unmistakable: three very different sisters of the O’Donnell family, along with their relations and hangers-on, navigate a collapsing estate, literally and figuratively, and grapple with a questionable family legacy and sense of purpose. Aristocrats is the second installment of the Irish Rep’s Friel Project, following an exquisite production of Translations.

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

A specter is haunting Rachel Bloom—the specter of death. In fact, Death is sitting in the fifth row of her show, Death, Let Me Do My Show, looking suspiciously like Bloom’s friend David Hull, the “moderately successful actor who seems stuck between leading man and character roles” (as she describes him). And Death insists on being acknowledged, contrary to Bloom’s plan to deliver the show as she conceived it in 2019.

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Unconfined

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Unconfined

Unconfined is a solo theater piece based on real-life events that asks a fundamental question: What does it mean to really know another person? In this case, the question is more difficult than usual, as the person to get to know is on lockdown on death row. The story of a seemingly kind, thoughtful, creative, and spiritually sophisticated convicted murderer came to playwright Liz Richardson’s attention when she “received a binder of extraordinary poems, drawings, and letters by a prisoner who had been on death row for 18 years,” as noted in the program. She wrote the piece based on her own research and interviews. Richardson portrays three characters who all interacted with the unseen, unnamed protagonist while he was imprisoned: Barbara, a professor of comparative religion at a Southern university; Eleanor, an English artist; and a fellow death-row inmate, Benny.

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Covenant

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Covenant

Audience noise is usually a nuisance in the theater: pinging smartphones, the rustling of bags, hacking coughs. York Walker’s Gothic horror play Covenant, however, elicited the more gratifying sounds of audience shrieks and gasps. Wonderfully inventive staging in the tiny Roundabout Underground space and a first-rate ensemble allow shocks and scares to flourish, mostly overcoming some lapses in the writing or plot twists that might not withstand too much scrutiny. Under Tiffany Nichole Greene’s direction, Covenant is genuinely scary, and that it achieves this for an audience inundated with high-budget, digital effects–driven entertainment is a testament to the theatrical craft on display.

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Sabbath’s Theater

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Sabbath’s Theater

Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater is considered outrageous and raunchy even by Rothian standards, with retired, arthritic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath making Alexander Portnoy—the hero of Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which launched his career—look tame by comparison. For Mickey there is no desire for redemption or decency; there is only narcissistic pleasure-seeking, misanthropy, and self-gratification at any cost. All of which begged the question, in a recent New York Times piece on John Turturro and writer Ariel Levy, who co-adapted the novel into a playscript, “Is 2023 ready for Sabbath?”

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Daphne

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Daphne

In “Ballad of a Thin Man” Bob Dylan sings, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is,” a refrain that applies perfectly to Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor), the eponymous character in a new play by Renae Simone Jarrett at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater. Something is certainly happening to Daphne, psychologically and physically, but the uncanny transformation doesn’t obey the conventional rules of time or space, and nothing may be what it seems.

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All the Devils Are Here

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All the Devils Are Here

Patrick Page’s investigation into Shakespeare’s villains is a master class on the Bard and a bravura demonstration of Shakespearean acting. In All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Page brings a lifetime of performing and thinking about Shakespeare to the stage. He inhabits characters running the full range of Shakespeare’s dramatic career and imparts some of the wisdom he has accrued along the way, summoning evil spirits one moment and serving as congenial, good-natured, and charismatic host into the heart of darkness the next.

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Partnership

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Partnership

An advantageous business offer, with a loveless marriage thrown in: this is one of the would-be “partnerships” around which Elizabeth Baker’s 1917 drama Partnership, a feminist parable and Romantic cri de coeur in the guise of a comedy of manners, revolves. As is so often the case with the plays that the Mint Theater Company rescues from obscurity, the issues are both historically specific and still relevant. Must the demands of business always be at odds with personal nourishment? Should one prize practicality or love? Does respectability entail a life of drudgery, while a life well lived means being branded as “mad”?

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Dig

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Dig

The plant-store setting of Theresa Rebeck’s play Dig might be reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors, but in Dig the plants are the victims, not the aggressors—victims of human selfishness, anger, and desire. For Roger (Jeffrey Bean), the tightly wound owner of the store (which is named Dig), the damage done to plants is more keenly felt than the damage human beings do to others or to themselves; and it is also more easily addressed, as Roger is a master of restoring vitality and life to seemingly doomed plants. With people, he’d really rather not be bothered.

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Infinite Life

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Infinite Life

Annie Baker makes her much-anticipated return to Off-Broadway with the world premiere of Infinite Life, a coproduction with Britain’s National Theatre. The play, once titled On the Uses of Pain for Life, was slated for Fall 2021 at Signature Theatre, but it never materialized; Baker’s most recent play, The Antipodes, was produced at Signature in 2017. It takes only a few moments of Infinite Life’s halting and delightfully awkward opening exchange for Baker to captivate with her uncanny blend of the naturalistic and the absurd, honing in on human frailty with a merciless yet empathetic eye, this time trained on patients at an alternative pain clinic in Northern California.

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Uncle Vanya

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Uncle Vanya

Director Jack Serio’s intimate staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had a brief run in July at a private loft in the Flatiron District (16 nights, with 40 spectators per night), and has now returned for a few weeks at a different loft in the same neighborhood. The original run cultivated a buzz of exclusivity—“sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it,” as described in the New Yorker. The impression that you have been granted entrée to an event persists in the encore engagement: the program given to the relatively few (but more than 40) audience members includes a countdown of how many performances remain.

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Primary Trust

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Primary Trust

Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Fiasco Theater, in a joint production with Red Bull Theater, takes on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was a flop when it premiered in 1607. Though it has been occasionally revived, the play is mostly of scholarly interest: Beaumont is best-known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as writer-in-residence of the King’s Men, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle is Beaumont’s only play written alone. If the comedy doesn’t offer up the richness or complexity of Shakespeare, Fiasco is clearly drawn to its story of topsy-turvy community-building through theater.

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