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.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is a quotation attributed to French novelist Honoré de Balzac, but it applies directly to the plot of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895). Written close to Wilde’s peak—it opened just a month before The Importance of Being Earnest—Husband fizzes with epigrams and uses heightened language to expose hypocrisy. The Storm Theatre is brave to tackle the work, packed both with melodrama and wit, but to succeed, as Sir Peter Hall did with his Broadway production 30 years ago, requires skills and experience that it can’t altogether muster.
That Parenting Musical, written by real-life mom-and-dad team Graham and Kristina Fuller, is a show that whimsically explores the ups and downs of parenting. Breezily directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman, it is two hours of rib-tickling fun.
