Ben Target’s solo show Lorenzo is an end-of-life comedy that is both joyful and surprising. Written and performed by Target (pronounced Tar-ZHAY), and directed by Adam Brace and Lee Griffiths, it is an autobiographical 65 minutes that focuses on a time when Target gave up his work as a comedian to become a live-in caretaker for an aging family friend, “Uncle” Lorenzo Wong.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and performance-artist Taylor Mac, both recipients of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” and past finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are currently at the Signature Theatre for a revival of Ruhl’s 1998 adaptation of Orlando, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. Mac, who’s playing the title role, is renowned as a dramatist but, on this occasion, serves strictly as an actor.
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.
The title of Lia Romeo’s play Still, it must be clarified, is unrelated to manufacturing moonshine in the mountains of Appalachia. Rather, her wistful two-hander is about seniors reconnecting—the kind of story that pops up periodically in bridal pages about two spouses whose longtime partners have died and who have somehow reconnected with their youthful heartthrobs. The stories carry an inherent charm, one that is aided immeasurably by two superb performers, Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly.
In addition to introducing the word robot to the English language, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi drama R.U.R. depicted a dystopian world in which scientifically manufactured laborers gradually eradicate humans. The play perfectly captured the anxieties of the burgeoning Machine Age and was a big hit on Broadway in 1922. S. Asher Gelman’s Scarlett Dreams attempts to tap into similar uneasiness as the former Information Age settles into the current Age of Intelligence. With the meteoric advancement and sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), the play suggests that it may be just a matter of time when people will be controlled by digital avatars, and the difference between reality and virtual reality (VR) will become purely conjectural.
The afterlife of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was as brilliant as his failed life of train and bank robbery was bleak. In the new musical Dead Outlaw, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna (music and lyrics), and Itamar Moses (book) team up with director David Cromer to tell the true story of a turn-of-the-century outlaw who became a famous carnival attraction after his untimely death.
There are few theatrical experiences more thrilling than witnessing a new play catch fire and mesmerize an audience. That experience is now to be had at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, where British playwright Ruby Thomas’s airtight 80-minute drama, The Animal Kingdom, is making its U.S. premiere. Tautly directed by Jack Serio, it’s a show that is emotionally gripping and ultimately redemptive.
Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.
Issues of Jewish identity, religion, heritage and oppression are given a fresh spin in Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, a work of considerable length and intellectual heft. Harmon has set his drama in France, America’s oldest ally, which shares its values. Although it is a country closer geographically and emotionally to the harrowing experience inflicted on Jews by World War II and the Holocaust, it stands in for the United States as well. Incidents of anti-Semitism have increased in both countries in the last decade.
“Regarding suicide I just don’t have sad emotions,” says Jacob, the occasional narrator of The Treasurer, Max Posner’s deeply felt, sharply observed play about dementia and care-giving. Jacob (a no-nonsense, resentful Peter Friedman) is the hard-as-nails son who, along with Allen and Jeremy, the more accommodating brothers, must take care of his widowed mother, Ida (Deanna Dunagin, who charts a painfully realistic physical and mental decline). By the play’s end, Jacob is as sad as can be.
