Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
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.
Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic revenge fantasy about a basketball superstar who was born as a consequence of Zeus’s raping of a mortal woman. This multilayered piece uses poetry, music, and a mix of Greek and Yoruba mythology for a lyrical meditation on power, patriarchy, and the black feminist response to the #MeToo movement.
“If a work is quite perfect,” wrote W.H. Auden about Hamlet, “it arouses less controversy and there is less to say about it.” Across four centuries, critics have found plenty to discuss in this longest of Shakespeare’s plays (also one of his most frequently performed). Auden is prominent among those viewing it as severely flawed. Director Robert Icke has joined the colloquy with an absorbing stage production, now at the Park Avenue Armory, that handles the script’s ostensible defects with aplomb and, in so doing, refutes T.S. Eliot’s suggestion that Hamlet is an “artistic failure.”
