Offoffonline — Off Off Online

Colin Macdonald

You Will Get Sick

You Will Get Sick

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.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Chester Bailey

Chester Bailey

Ephraim Birney, who plays the titular character in Joseph Dougherty’s Chester Bailey, mentions in his playbill bio that he “bears a striking resemblance to his co-star.” His co-star is the acclaimed theater actor Reed Birney, Ephraim’s father, and Ephraim is correct about the resemblance, not just in physical terms but also in talent: Chester Bailey showcases two fine actors in a play about trauma, delusion, and regret.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

The Sea Lady

The Sea Lady

In 1930, the theater artist Neith Boyce was commissioned to adapt H. G. Wells’s 1901 fantasy novel The Sea Lady for the stage. After five years of work, and with a Broadway production planned, Wells’s agent rescinded the rights to the novel, and the play was never seen. For decades the manuscript resided at Yale’s Beinecke Library, until Boyce’s biographer sent it to the Metropolitan Playhouse, which is currently staging the play’s world premiere under the direction (and design) of the company’s artistic director, Alex Roe.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

I’m Revolting

I’m Revolting

Hospital waiting rooms are queasy yet strangely intimate spaces that have a way of whittling away pretense and revealing a person’s true self. Relationships with strangers can feel significant. Sensitive information about bodies is routinely, almost blithely, discussed. Gracie Gardner makes use of this fraught setting in I’m Revolting, which takes place in the waiting area of a skin-cancer clinic in New York City in 2019. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the play has flashes of excellence but never fully coheres or figures out what story, exactly, it is telling.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

On Feb. 18, 1965, author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale) debated whether “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in England. The debate generated excitement and interest at the time—as described by historian Kevin Schultz, more than 700 (white) students showed up, and filled the room to overflowing. The face-off, reenacted in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, has since become legendary, the subject of books and documentaries, in particular because of Baldwin’s brilliant dissection of race in America, which continues to be painfully relevant today.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Chains

Chains

Elizabeth Baker wrote her first full-length play, Chains, at 32, and after it premiered in London in 1909, critics hailed a “new playwright of unmistakable dramatic genius.” But despite many plays that followed, success in London did not come again for Baker. And so Chains fits into the Mint Theater Company’s mission to “find and produce worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” That mission is fulfilled in remarkable fashion in director Jenn Thompson’s lucid, moving, and exquisitely acted production, which feels both grounded in a specific historical and cultural milieu and yet also relevant today.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Three Sisters

Three Sisters

It seems to never be a bad time to stage Chekhov’s Three Sisters: timeless and timely, funny and devastating, remarkably in tune with the currents of real life, and providing material for great actors to explore memorable and fully rounded characters.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

A Case for the Existence of God

A Case for the Existence of God

Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Citizen Wong

Citizen Wong

Richard Chang mixes history and fiction in Citizen Wong to tell the story of Wong Chin Foo, the nineteenth-century Chinese-American journalist, activist, performer, and lecturer who fought for equal rights for Chinese-Americans and to dispel pernicious, racist stereotypes about Chinese people and culture. Presented by Pan Asian Repertory, Citizen Wong is co-directed by Ernest Abuba and Chongren Fan and features a cast of six, with the actors playing multiple characters, including historical personages or those inspired by such. The work is ambitious and timely, explicitly drawing connections to the present-day rise in anti-Asian bigotry.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

The Daughter-in-Law

The Daughter-in-Law

D. H. Lawrence wrote The Daughter-in-Law in 1912–13, at the age of 27, around the same time as his novel Sons and Lovers. The play’s first production came posthumously, in 1967. There have been very few productions since, one of which was by the Mint Theater Company, in 2003, fulfilling its mission to “find and produce worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” Now Martin Platt, who directed that production, again takes the reins for the company’s revival of The Daughter-in-Law, currently playing at City Center Stage II.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

The Lanford Wilson Project: “The Mound Builders” and “Sympathetic Magic”

The Lanford Wilson Project: “The Mound Builders” and “Sympathetic Magic”

Lanford Wilson’s 1975 play The Mound Builders centers on an archaeological excavation in Illinois of a pre-Columbian civilization, a conceit rich in metaphor and suggestion, and expressed in often-lyrical language. (The mounds in question refer to the earthworks constructed by the early inhabitants of the area.) The historical reach and resonance of the concept is combined with the claustrophobia of domestic dysfunction: the play was described in the New York Times review of the original Circle Repertory Company production as “an epic in the guise of a family drama.”

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Autumn Royal

Autumn Royal

There’s a moment early in Kevin Barry’s darkly comic Autumn Royal, currently running at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, when siblings May (Maeve Higgins) and Timmy (John Keating), both in their 30s in Cork city, Ireland, realize that the current predicament of caring for their psychotic, decrepit, slowly dying father might have no end in sight.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Sanctuary City

Sanctuary City

The programs handed out at Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, produced by New York Theatre Workshop and presented at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, note that they have been “frozen in time”: they were printed for the play’s original run, which began in March 2020, and are now accompanied by a QR code providing updated information. This new information includes a remount director, Caitlin Sullivan, in addition to the original direction by Rebecca Frecknall.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad

What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad

It finally dawned on me that theater was back in New York City when I was once again in the presence of characters in a Richard Nelson play as they sliced bread, grated cheese, sipped wine, and had conversations that made you feel like an eavesdropper more than an audience member.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Frankenstein

Frankenstein

Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Timothy Douglas and playing in repertory with Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Dracula at Classic Stage Company, is a strange hybrid of the ploddingly literal and the vaguely conceptual. Its pleasures lie in listening to Stephanie Berry, who plays both Victor Frankenstein and “the Creature,” recite long passages of beautiful prose. But as a piece of theater, it is a flat, almost somnolent experience, and one that doesn’t seem to say anything new or urgent about the story.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Dracula

Dracula

In Kate Hamill’s adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula at Classic Stage Company, fighting against vampires becomes synonymous with fighting the patriarchy. With Sarna Lapine directing (she also directed Hamill’s Little Women) and a stellar cast, Hamill’s Dracula manages to be hilarious without descending into farce, perhaps because so much of the humor is in the service of a feminist reshaping of Stoker’s novel, which turns the struggle against vampires into a struggle for self-individuation and self-determination.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

The Sabbath Girl

The Sabbath Girl

Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, produced by the Penguin Rep and currently at 59e59, is an attempt at a throwback romantic comedy, a story of two lonely souls from different cultural worlds who find each other in the big city and forge ahead in the name of love despite all the obstacles.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

The Commons

The Commons

Lily Akerman’s The Commons should come with a trigger warning for anyone who has ever had multiple roommates in a New York City apartment. She depicts four roommates (three millennials and one Gen Xer) as they navigate the harrowing questions and minutiae of shared space—the buildup of burnt tomato sauce on a stove top, the viability of leftover jars of food, the ethics of decluttering, the disappearance of chocolate almonds, the gendering of certain chores, and, God forbid, the presence of a mouse—with various shades of aggression and passive-aggression.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

A Peregrine Falls

A Peregrine Falls

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).

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

Timon of Athens

Timon of Athens

There are numerous challenges in staging Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare’s least produced works (perhaps not even performed during his own lifetime). It’s an invective-filled and disjointed morality tale, a story of a profligate spender let down by false friends who turns to excessive isolation and bitterness. Probably coauthored with Thomas Middleton, Timon is usually described as deficient in some way or as so odd as to defy categorization: words such as “baffling,” “curious,” “unfinished,” “abandoned,” and “mistake” populate major works of criticism. Even its place in the First Folio is dubious, as textual oddities arguably demonstrate it was not originally intended to be included among Shakespeare’s collected works.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post