Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
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.
Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola’s lively satiric musical Ghost of John McCain has a throw-anything-at-the-wall feel to it, but it’s apt: the action takes place inside the mind of President Donald Trump between Aug. 25, 2018 (the date of John McCain’s death) and Jan. 6, 2021. Given the attention span of the ex-President, it’s no wonder that events in his mind carom around like billiard balls.
Max Wolf Friedlich packs a boomer–Gen Z clash, thoughts about modern technology, gender politics, liberals’ self-flagellation, the belligerent anxiety that’s become our national character, and a whopper of a twist into the 85-minute run time of Job, his first play produced Off Broadway. Also making her Off-Broadway debut with Job is actress Sydney Lemmon, granddaughter of movie legend Jack, recently seen opposite Cate Blanchett in Tár and opposite the venomous Roy clan on Succession—where her Job costar, Peter Friedman, had a recurring role.
Shortly after launching into his solo show Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison talks about being mugged. The thief, armed with a gun, demanded his cell phone, and Morrison resisted because it had pictures of his late lover Jonathan on it. “I know we just met,” Morrison tells his audience, “but I think we can all agree that was off-brand.” (It’s clear from the audience’s ebullience that they know perfectly well what his brand is. The mostly young crowd in fleeces and pullovers and trainers have been boisterously waiting for him, even drowning out the pre-show music.) “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” explains the comedian. “We’re not known to excel in moments of crisis.”
You may remember Soho Playhouse before the pandemic. Located in an antebellum row house just off Sixth Avenue, it often featured solo and Fringe Festival plays in its careworn mainstage theater or cabaret downstairs, its stairwell adorned with framed posters of shows that had played there.
The promise of better living through chemistry is put to the acid test in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, a sincere, occasionally scary, and often jovial adaptation of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson tale. The play won the 2018 Fringe Encore Series Outstanding Production Award and now returns to the Soho Playhouse for a six-week victory lap.
James and Jamesy in the Dark is an extraordinary piece of theater that fits no mold but its own. It draws on many sources—or pays homage to them—but it is a unique, thought-provoking delight. Two gifted physical performers (in whiteface and dressed top-to-toe in gray outfits, including gloves) embody the title characters. Eventually, the audience comes to recognize the taller one as Aaron Malkin’s more phlegmatic James and the shorter, more emotionally fragile one as Alastair Knowles’s Jamesy.
The playful title Signal Failure refers, on the one hand, to a subway signal and, on the other, to signals between Brian and Lorna, a young couple who connect through their dogged observations of people in the London Underground, aka the "Tube" (they’re British and the show comes from the Edinburgh Festival), and then face some bumpy times.
Structured as a series of monologues, sometimes interlocking, from two lonely people, and then eventually incorporating scenes between them, as they connect for sex and their common interest, Signal Failure relies for its charm and romanticism on the immense charm of its two stars. Sasha Ellen, who plays Lorna with a matter-of-fact optimism and a touch of daffiness, also wrote the piece. Her opposite, Spenser Cowan, plays Brian, who begins their story, relating his hobby of watching men and women on the Tube.
“There’s a bloke sitting opposite me. About my age,” says Brian. “In a suit that makes him look small. Scruffy. He majorly oversteps the initial 10-second window. Not just that, but he does it with a girl I wouldn’t even open that window with. She stares intently at her iPad but stops moving her hand. She’s frozen but she doesn’t look up.” She knows she’s being watched, of course.
Brian’s hobby eventually becomes more dogged, as he follows the couples he sees connecting on the Tube, noticing when they leave together and whether they are wearing the same clothing on the following day. “I create a basic structure and watch my stats improve,” he says. It turns out that his own life is empty, through no fault of his own, and he is just trying to fill it.
One day, though, while reading the newspaper, “I find a column with what seems to be personal ads. But when I look closer is actually people texting in about other people they’ve seen on the train. People they’ve liked the look of. Asking them to get in touch. Like an Underground dating agency in a newspaper column. Each text smacks of hope desperation. Most of the messages are generic. ‘To the pretty girl who smiled at me in a crowded carriage’ kind of messages.”
For her part, Lorna becomes clued in to the ads when she tries to comfort a friend, Maddy. “She tells me that she read something that she was convinced was for her. She hands me the newspaper, folded open on a page towards the back. I don’t get it at first but then it clicks. All these people writing in to the paper. Trying to get in touch with someone they glimpsed on the train. It’s quite a cool idea in theory. I try to talk to Maddy, but she’s distraught and I’m a stranger. She wipes her eyes and leaves. I sit in the bathroom for a bit and read the other posts. They are pretty varied in sincerity and tone. Ranging from ‘Yo 2 da curvy blond’ to ‘I believe we are meant to be together.’ ”
Eventually Brian and Lorna meet and sort of click. They make rookie mistakes. Some of the best scenes are these lurching, nuanced ones as they both hang in for the long haul to happiness. As with all romance, eventually their lonely and unhappy pasts trickle out and cause problems. They’re a bit contrived, but the actors are persuasive. (It’s a wonder that Ellen’s first-date description of beams of light shooting out of her pelvis doesn’t scare him off.)
Although the drama is low-key, director Peter Darney keeps the focus on the remarkable chemistry between his actors. (The only set elements are two large wooden cubes and a platform that become table or bed.) Ellen and Cowan are endearing as they stumblingly come together. There’s playfulness from Lorna as she sends a near-naked Brian out to the kitchen as a signal to her roommates that she’s successfully had a night of passion. Meanwhile, a variety of emotions play on Brian’s face the morning after; and when he says, “I will call you, maybe,” it’s with an amusing ambivalence; he’s trying not to be vulnerable. Should he see this girl again or not?
Although Signal Failure may feel small, it carries the weight of truth and serves as an enjoyable calling card for two talented actors you’ll want to see again.
Signal Failure plays at the SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St., through Nov. 16. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 9:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday (with no performance on Nov. 6). Matinees are 3 p.m. Wednesday and Sunday, and 5 p.m. on Saturdays. For tickets, visit www.sohoplayhouse.com.
