The Clubbed Thumb theater company follows up last year’s excellent Grief Hotel with another gem that originated in its Summerworks program, Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound, in which a group of islanders in the Pacific Northwest mourn the disappearance of a nearby pod of orca whales. The production, in residency at the Public Theater, is astonishing: Koogler’s play is both strange and naturalistic, as funny as it is deeply moving, even shattering; Arin Arbus’s note-perfect direction is mesmerizing, smartly enhancing the emotional climaxes but never overdoing them; and the ensemble of nine is simply extraordinary.
Matthew Lombardo wrangles comedy out of a story that is often not comical—wisecracks can be hard to resist coming from a wisecracking pro like Caroline Aaron—but both the humor and pathos in his new play Conversations with Mother are calculated and shallow.
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
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?”
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.”
Wounded, by Jiggs Burgess, is both gritty and warm. Digging into dark subjects such as alcoholism, drunk driving, co-dependent relationships, the alienation of being gay in a small town, and sexual assault, the play also shows how, in the face of adversity, humanity still shines through in some people.
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.
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.
Empire, a musical about the building of the Empire State Building—has a lot of heart. Set in three time periods—1929, 1930, and 1976—the story moves back and forth between Sylvie Lee (Julia Louise Hosack) and Mohawk Grandmother (April Ortiz) in the 1970s and the character of Frances Belle (Kaitlyn Davidson), a.k.a. “Wally,” a firecracker of a woman who is classy in pants, working her magic in a man’s world in the 1920s and ’30s, as the iconic skyscraper is being built.
Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in the 1960s by Irish playwright Brian Friel, poignantly captures the anticipation, fear, and excitement of emigrating to a new place. Set on the eve of departure, Friel’s play focuses on Gar, the would-be émigré, in both his Public self (played with subdued melancholy by David McElwee) as he struggles with his decision to leave, and his Private self (played with exuberance by A.J. Shively), screaming to get out. It’s deadly boring in Ballybeg, a tiny little corner of County Donegal, Ireland, where the most exciting things are a game of checkers and memories of teenage shenanigans.
The broken pieces of public education are laid bare in Fish, a world premiere drama by Kia Corthron presented by the Keen Company. Set in an unnamed high school, the play captures the ails of urban education, the poverty-stricken neighborhoods in which they sit, and the resulting challenges students experience as they try to keep their heads above water.
Amsterdam’s red-light district, circa 1956. A man walks into a bar and chews on the question: What does it mean to fall from grace? And, as a man who is having a few drinks in a bar and talking to strangers, he will ask many more questions, sometimes personal and often philosophical. In The Fall, by Albert Camus, a French philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and is considered the father of existentialism, the man in the bar is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer who has himself fallen from grace.
In William Shakespeare’s Richard III, the title character is a hunchback whose anger is fueled because he feels like an outcast. His quest for power becomes a form of revenge. Under Robert O’Hara’s direction, Richard III for the Public Theater is loose and playful. Actress Danai Gurira, in the gender-swapped title role, is sinewy and tiger-like. As Richard, she pounces, manipulates, smiles, grins, and grimaces: a shape-shifter who manipulates others.
Mime is a silent art of storytelling that requires great physical expressiveness. It is often associated with street performers, but Broken Box Mime’s Take Shape sets a new paradigm for the art form: mime as performance for the theater. Eight vignettes range in themes from global warming to cooking and parenting. There are no props, stage design or costume changes. All the stories in Take Shape are conveyed through the highly physicalized art of pantomime.
Incantata, by Pulitzer Prize–winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, is an elegy crafted into a theatrical narrative that loosely weaves together erudite poetic imagery and concrete memories with literary and artistic references. The experience is a journey through bumpy waters, a sensory and linguistic adventure with Stanley Townsend, a tremendously talented and physical actor, at the helm of the solo show.
Blues for an Alabama Sky, by Pearl Michelle Cleage, has been around for 25 years, but only now has the Keen Company given it a New York debut. Still, Cleage’s work, about black artists struggling in 1930, during the Harlem Renaissance, is as relevant today as it was a quarter-century ago. Poverty, discrimination, abortion rights, violence, and the everyday hustle to make it are still real issues in 2020.
Novenas for a Lost Hospital is a memory play told through several narrators that celebrates St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic charitable hospital in the West Village that was founded in 1849 and closed in 2010. The novenas (devotional prayers in Catholicism), of which there are nine, give structure to the elegant sections that move back and forth in time from the founding to the closing. The effect is part drama, part history lesson, and part activism/immersive theater.
Mac Wellman is a grand master of absurdity, and the Flea Theater is currently presenting a festival of five plays in rotating repertory. Two of them, Bad Penny and Serenity Forever, are classic examples of Wellman’s work, which often weaves together an exploration of the everyday with mythology, the metaphysical, and American consciousness.
The Playwrights Realm will present two world premieres in its 2019–20 season as part of its mission of supporting new dramatists. The first production will be Anna Moench’s The Mothers (beginning Sept. 13 at the Duke on 42nd Street). The play is described as part “social satire” and part “survival tale” and incorporates work with the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project (RPI), an initiative launched by Playwrights Realm in association with Parent Artist Advocacy League for the Performing Arts (PAAL). The initiative focuses on socio-economic issues involved in parenting. The second play will be Noah Diaz’s Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally, which takes a look at the characters from elementary-school readers from the 1950s. Diaz examines the characters as grown-ups; his play will begin in April 2020. For more information, visit playwrightsrealm.org.
Tender Napalm, directed by David Norwood, is a postmodern love/hate story that examines the lines between fantasy and reality. When the play opens, a man (Amara James Aja) and a woman (Ayana Major Bey), face off and speak to each other in poetic language, filled with violent imagery and sexual innuendos. The abstract and poetic language, coupled with the nonlinear narrative, gives the play a surreal feel.
Harlem Repertory’s The Wizard of Oz is a theatrical romp accompanied by a lively jazz trio. Directed and choreographed by Keith Lee Grant, themes of self-discovery, connection to family and facing one’s fears are well tackled and performed by a wonderful multicultural cast. They bring to life the events that propel the Kansas schoolgirl, Dorothy, on a magical mystery tour as she follows the yellow brick road.
Original Sound, deftly written by Adam Seidel, explores the idea of what it means to be an original music artist in the age of the Internet, which has made it easy to borrow pieces of others’ work (“sample”) and use in your own. At the center of the story are Danny Solis (the sublime yet down-to-earth Sebastian Chacon), a Nuyorican mix artist who is having a hard time getting by in life because all he wants to do is make music, and Ryan Reed (Jane Bruce, a talented singer/songwriter in her own right) who is an upcoming star with a recording contract.
Can a sinner become a saint? That is the question John Wulp explores in The Saintliness of Margery Kempe, first produced in 1958 at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and last seen in an Off-Broadway production the following year. The story is loosely based on the real life of Margery Kempe, a woman who lived in the 14th century and wrote the first known autobiography in Western literature. At the beginning of the play, Margery (the wonderful Andrus Nichols, who brings an energetic intensity to the role) declares, “Morality, damn all morality, damn, damn, damn.” A feminist long before the feminist movement, she seeks to shrug off the assumptions that inform her role as mother, housewife and religious community member. She hates it all and leaves home.
Inspired by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, Boomerang Theatre Company’s Loveless Texas is a toe-tapping musical comedy set during the early years of the Great Depression. Although many of the characters hold the same names as in the Shakespeare play, the story begins with a twist: Berowne Loveless Navarre (the hugely talented Joe Joseph) and his buddies—Duke Dumaine (Colin Barkell) and Bubba Longaville (Brett Benowitz)—are playboys who travel from New York to Paris. Along the way they do all the things that upstanding young men shouldn’t be doing: chase women, drink liquor and spend the Navarre family money.
