Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
The Alchemist’s Veil, created, choreographed, and performed by dance artist Maureen Fleming, is a fascinating fusion of surreal movement poetry and spellbinding visuals, inspired by the paintings of renowned artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Part dance, part dream, part art appreciation, it’s altogether a showcase for Fleming, who is celebrating her 70th birthday this year and the 35th anniversary of her 1989 debut with La MaMa.
Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.
Richard Chang mixes history and fiction in Citizen Wong to tell the story of Wong Chin Foo, the nineteenth-century Chinese-American journalist, activist, performer, and lecturer who fought for equal rights for Chinese-Americans and to dispel pernicious, racist stereotypes about Chinese people and culture. Presented by Pan Asian Repertory, Citizen Wong is co-directed by Ernest Abuba and Chongren Fan and features a cast of six, with the actors playing multiple characters, including historical personages or those inspired by such. The work is ambitious and timely, explicitly drawing connections to the present-day rise in anti-Asian bigotry.
Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.
