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.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
The main character in Rachel Bonds’ new drama Jonah is not Jonah but Ana, a young woman portrayed from age 16 into her 30s by Gabby Beans, who’s on stage for the entire play. Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) is in only the first third, except for a brief reappearance near the end. The play peaks during those early scenes, which are charming and funny, then gets increasingly talky and disturbing in the post-Jonah scenes.
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.
When Katie Holmes made her New York stage debut in 2008, she was married to Tom Cruise, and paparazzi descended on Broadway for her run in the All My Sons revival. Coincidentally, one of the first things Holmes says in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is “I can’t go anywhere in public without a hassle.” Holmes portrays a beautiful, famous actress, which sounds like a good fit for her. The role is a bad fit for the play itself, however, as it does not cohere with the other story lines.
Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick is a surrealist, allegorical play about illness, loss, and human connection. The primary setting is The Big City, in something resembling modernity before cellular phones, though this is also a primeval, mythic world, where giant birds are liable to snatch you up (best to buy “certified bird insurance,” just in case). The characters are blasé about such events, but there’s also an awareness that something isn’t quite right: the play’s unseen narrator notes that “a bird caws outside your window / it’s too tremendous, too prehistoric / too loud for a city this big.”
Greasy fast food certainly takes its toll on the health of Americans, but it’s not usually so direct as death by Fry-O-Later. Such is the grisly fate of Duncan, at the hands of Mac and Pat McBeth, in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Scotland, PA, a musical adaptation of Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, which was a dark-comic send-up of 1970s Middle America using the plot of Macbeth in a fast-food setting.
Jodi (Idina Menzel), the fortysomething central character in Joshua Harmon’s attention-grabbing new drama, Skintight, is having a bad time. She has arrived unannounced at her father’s Greenwich Village townhouse to help celebrate his 70th birthday, even though she has been warned not to by her dad. But she’s determined to connect with those who love her in her time of trial: in Los Angeles she has just attended the wedding of her ex-husband to a perky young 25-year-old.
