Thomas Jay Ryan

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Kramer/Fauci

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Kramer/Fauci

On entering St. Ann’s Warehouse for Daniel Fish’s Kramer/Fauci, the entire expanse of the building is visible. The floor is matte black, and on the far wall a bank of lights beams intensely toward the audience, replicating a high school football stadium in Texas. Although the scenic design is credited to Jim Findlay, Joshua Higgason, and Amy Rubin, and the lighting to Scott Zielinski, the importance is the actors, who re-create a 1993 C-SPAN interview with writer (the novel Faggots; the play The Normal Heart) and ACT UP activist Larry Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (Will Brill), then known as the premier AIDS researcher in the country.

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Franklinland

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Franklinland

It can’t have been easy to have polymath and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin for a father—talk about expectations. In Lloyd Suh’s Franklinland, a comic rendering of the relationship between Franklin and his son William, Franklin is portrayed by the superb Thomas Jay Ryan, who captures perfectly Suh’s conception of the character as conceited, brilliant, and callous. Franklin himself knows this, and uses his own outsized reputation as a cudgel against his somewhat bumbling offspring.

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Arden of Faversham

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Arden of Faversham

The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.

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Eureka Day

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Eureka Day

Jonathan Spector’s new play Eureka Day is the unusual satire that takes aim at left-wing politics. It is perhaps the most notable rare bird of its kind since Jonathan Reynolds’s wonderful Stonewall Jackson’s House, which appeared more than 20 years ago. Spector sets his play in Berkeley, Calif., a town whose radical politics have put it at the forefront of social change yet also earned it the nickname Berserkeley.  

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