The Axis Theatre Company’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is something to celebrate. Directed by Randall Sharp, and superbly performed by a 12-member ensemble cast, this Twelfth Night is a wild and wonderful romp through Illyria.
Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
October 7: A Verbatim Play by Phelim McAleers depicts events in the Gaza Envelope of southwest Israel on the day of last year’s attack by the Islamist organization Hamas. It’s based on interviews conducted by McAleers and his wife, journalist-filmmaker Ann McElhinnie, immediately after the siege that reportedly killed 1,200 people, wounded an estimated 5,400, and resulted in seizure by Hamas of more than 250 hostages. In a May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, President Joe Biden lamented that, eight months after the assault (and despite ongoing warfare in Israel and Gaza), “people are already forgetting” the brutality of that day. McAleer’s play is agitprop against forgetfulness, burning a sense of the day’s agony into playgoers’ imaginations.
It’s I’m Not Rappaport meets Waiting for Godot meets The Gin Game! Take two old codgers on a park bench, combine with existential meanderings in a fixed setting, season with the ravages of aging, and you have Just Another Day, Dan Lauria’s uncertain reflection on all three components (but especially the third). Just Another Day suffers from being too much—well, just another day. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and a great deal of curiously multisyllabic palaver fills out the hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. But it does have two actors very much worth seeing, for Lauria has cast himself, and opposite him, a flawless Patty McCormack.
Summer means free theater in New York, and Molière in the Park, an organization co-founded by Lucie Tiberghien and Garth Belcon. The Miser becomes the third free production at LeFrak Center, following The Misanthrope (2022) and Tartuffe (2023). Directed by Tiberghien, it’s an invigorating new version of the French playwright’s 1668 satire.
Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade, a queer musical-memoir that marries narrative and song, has returned to the Wild Project for a limited engagement. Directed by Lisa Peterson, Sobule (music, lyrics, and concept) shares her life story thus far, cleverly drawing upon her stultifying days in seventh grade as a jumping-off point to examine her life beyond middle school.
Leegrid Stevens’s A Peregrine Falls, now at the Wild Project under the direction of Padraic Lillis, tells the story of a Mormon family in Austin, Texas, in 2010 and 2012, as they grapple with the aftermath of horrific family abuse. The play combines realism, in scenes taking place in hospital and state-court waiting areas and a family-owned car dealership (scenic design by Zoë Hurwitz), with flights of dream imagery and symbolism, the latter mostly conveyed by a narrator who is both within and without the story (the peregrine of the title stands for the ultimate predator, a bird who preys on other birds).
Jordan Jaffe’s comedy-drama Whirlwind hinges on a hot topic: environmental activism. It’s also descriptive of the relationships at its center. Bethany Goodbridge (Annapurna Sriram) handles issues of environment, health and safety at Arrow Energy, a San Francisco firm that builds wind farms. Her boss, Cooper (Johnny Wu), is an arrogant corporate type who likes to brag that he has his own jet. He also has more than a businesslike eye on her. Christian Conn plays the man who brings the whirlwind into their lives and ruffles their feathers—an apt description, since he is irate that one of the company’s isolated wind farms is killing birds at a terrible rate.
Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home, a trio of monologues about the postwar experiences of veterans, focuses on the insurmountable stresses on those who have been emotionally and psychologically scarred by war. Author J.A. Moad II, who has written and performs the plays, is himself a veteran. It is, perhaps, impossible for a civilian who has never endured combat to understand what it’s like, but civilian vs. military mindsets have underpinned plays from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to David Hare’s Plenty (1978), whose heroine Susan Traherne, after fighting for the French Resistance, thrashes about in an unfulfilling civilian life that can never excite her as much as living on the knife’s edge.
In a Little Room, a delightful new black comedy by Pete McElligott, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Ten Bones Theatre Company, shows obvious influences of of Albee, Sartre and especially Beckett, but McElligott has his own voice. The play focuses on two primary characters, Manning (Jeb Kreager) and Charlie (Luis-Daniel Morales), who meet in a hospital waiting room on a very bad day. Initially, they try to conduct a whispered conversation to avoid waking another occupant, who is sleeping (David Triacca, who undertakes multiple roles), and then manage to wake him anyway with amusing ineptitude.
Villa, written and directed by Guillermo Calderón, opens on three women who are considering a scale model of the “villa,” a place in Chile where, in the 1970s under military dictator Augusto Pinochet (who ruled from 1973–90), atrocities were carried out, predominantly against women. One of the three, who are present-day Chileans, suggests making it into a Disneyland-like theme park of terror. There are other suggestions, too, but when they try to vote, each time a “spoiled ballot” appears that implies at any given time, one of them cannot be impartial—and the vote must be unanimous.
