Offoffonline — Off Off Online

Adrienne Onofri

,

The Best We Could

,
The Best We Could

An hour into The Best We Could, you realize you’re not watching the play you thought you were. Emily Feldman’s new drama seemed like it was a semi-experimental staging of a cross-country drive during which a grown woman and her dad visit national parks and revisit moments in their lives. Then, all of a sudden, it’s about something very specific beyond the sightseeing, bonding and memories. And the play belongs to a particular category of stories—and that category is not road trips or family relationships or Our Town riffs.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Fall River Fishing

, ,
Fall River Fishing

Lizzie Borden, a favorite true-crime subject since long before the genre had that name, is the inspiration behind Fall River Fishing, a new play directed by Eric Tucker and written by two of its cast members, Deb Knox and Zuzanna Szadkowski. Their double duty as playwrights and performers doesn’t fully convey just how much Knox and Szadkowski, along with their three castmates (Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson and Tony Torn), put into the show. It succeeds because of these five deeply invested performances, each actor playing two roles that require them to deliver absurdist, anachronistic dialogue and engage in physical gags like eating—and feeding each other—spaghetti with their hands, sitting on the toilet for an extended period of time and getting splattered with blood.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Wanderers

,
The Wanderers

When Katie Holmes made her New York stage debut in 2008, she was married to Tom Cruise, and paparazzi descended on Broadway for her run in the All My Sons revival. Coincidentally, one of the first things Holmes says in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is “I can’t go anywhere in public without a hassle.” Holmes portrays a beautiful, famous actress, which sounds like a good fit for her. The role is a bad fit for the play itself, however, as it does not cohere with the other story lines.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Lucy

,
Lucy

A few months ago Merriam-Webster declared gaslighting 2022’s word of the year. It’s a word with origins in the theater—inspired by the title of a 1938 play, which was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Gaslighting returns to the theater with Lucy, Erica Schmidt’s intriguing new drama in which a nanny seems to be playing mind games with the mother who hires her.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Memorial

,
Memorial

Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes

,
The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes

Some people, as students or adults, hear the word “poetry” and run in the other direction. They’re that intimidated, bored, puzzled or whatever by it. Gordon Boudreau obviously understands this, as he has condensed the history of poetry to major highlights and demonstrates just how irreverent and free-spirited one can be with verse in his solo show The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing

,
Evanston Salt Costs Climbing

In Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a young woman prone to panic attacks describes her behavior as “spinning out.” That would be an apt term, too, for what the play itself does. Somewhere around the 80-minute mark of the intermissionless 100-minute dramedy, it starts spinning out into surreal antics such as quick replays of the same scene, someone getting pulled underground and appearances by dead people.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Only Gold

,
Only Gold

A cast of 20. An original story, not based on a book or movie. Plenty of dancing. Few modern musicals have all these things, and that Only Gold does indicates the breadth of its ambition. Set in Paris in 1928, the show features an ensemble in near-constant motion on an art deco–styled stage with a long, winding staircase whose banister extends into a circular fixture suspended above the stage amid a sky of globular lights. In design and concept it’s a very ambitious project indeed.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post

What Kind of Woman

What Kind of Woman

It can be difficult to write a play that has both artistic and political merit, one that is dramaturgically sound and makes a political point emphatically. Often such plays succeed as agitprop, not so much as well-crafted works of theater. Abbe Tanenbaum doesn’t fall into the usual trap with her new drama What Kind of Woman: Abortion, the issue at hand, isn’t even discussed in depth until nearly halfway through the play, and the interpersonal drama is pleasant to watch unfold. Her characters and story lines could be developed more solidly, however.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Our Town . . . but Wilder

,
Our Town . . . but Wilder

“The Stage Manager in Our Town must be gay. I mean, he spends all his time gossiping about everyone in town and rearranging furniture.” This is a funny line, stereotypes notwithstanding. It sounds like something you might hear from the quippy gay men in good comedies like Will & Grace or Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Peerless

, ,
Peerless

This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

This Beautiful Future

, ,
This Beautiful Future

A woman walks over to a large flat-screen TV and, using the remote control, selects a karaoke track. Believe it or not, this is the start of a play set in occupied France in 1944: This Beautiful Future, directed by Jack Serio. That woman and her male counterpart—theater vets Angelina Fiordellisi and Austin Pendleton as characters named Angelina and Austin—are on stage for the entire 80-minute running time, but the story really centers on two teenagers: Otto, a German soldier stationed in Chartres in the summer of ’44, and Elodie, a local girl. They’re both painfully naive. She thinks her Jewish neighbors will eventually come home; he’s psyched to march into England and anticipates a quick British surrender.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Epiphany

, ,
Epiphany

Anybody who remembers the 2000 Broadway musical adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead would not be surprised to learn that Joyce’s story inspired Brian Watkins to write Epiphany. The productions look similar: set in a somberly lit room with a large rug in the center, a piano off to one side and multiple tables around. And in Epiphany, just as in The Dead, a group of people gather for a wintertime party in the home of someone named Morkan.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

New Golden Age

, ,
New Golden Age

Time and again, stories about what the future holds for technology and humanity have enthralled audiences—think of the rabid followings for The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, produced 50 years apart. Playwright Karen Hartman puts forth her contribution to the genre with New Golden Age. But whereas those TV shows grabbed viewers with suspense, plot twists and amusing allegory, New Golden Age mainly offers talking. More than three-quarters of its run time is occupied by one long scene, and it consists mostly of people standing around talking. That tedium outweighs any emotional reaction that Hartman’s Facebook-run-amok scenario may elicit.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Our Brother’s Son

,
Our Brother’s Son

Despite family secrets being revealed, two brushes with death, a constantly rotating set and repeated storming out of the house, not all that much happens in Our Brother’s Son, a passable but toothless drama by career gastroenterologist turned first-time playwright Charles Gluck.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

Colorblind

,
Colorblind

Wallace Demarriá’s play Colorblind, about the leader of a Black empowerment movement, debuted in Los Angeles in 2013 and is just now having its New York premiere. During the time between the two productions, George Floyd’s murder and Donald Trump’s embrace of white nationalists have altered the conversation around racial issues in the United States. The only apparent tweak to the play, though, is a prologue in which Clinton Muhammad, a supposedly controversial activist, makes a speech claiming that Trump was elected because Americans freaked out over having a Black president.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

SuperHero

, ,
SuperHero

SuperHero began performances the day after a gunman opened fire aboard a rush-hour Brooklyn subway train, giving added resonance to its protagonist’s decision to eschew violence as a response to personal turmoil. The playwriting debut of actor Ian Eaton, SuperHero is an autobiographical coming-of-age story about an awkward, overweight boy growing up in the Harlem projects in the 1980s.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
,

What You Are Now

,
What You Are Now

Insights into Cambodian identity and immigrant experiences are the strongest thread running through What You Are Now, Sam Chanse’s drama at Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in which a young neuroscientist sees new research on trauma-related memory as a way to finally heal her mother, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1970s Cambodia.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

This Space Between Us

, ,
This Space Between Us

This Space Between Us contains the opposite of an 11 o’clock number. The nonmusical scene late in the play is a showstopper all right, though not in the rousing good sense. Rather, all action and dialogue literally stop while two characters stand over an air mattress as it inflates. It lasts ... well, however long it takes an air mattress to inflate, which may only be about a minute but seems a lot longer, since the audience has to sit there and wait out this unnecessary moment in a show that has already worn out its welcome.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post
, ,

Sandblasted

, ,
Sandblasted

Before the play Sandblasted even begins, it grabs the audience’s attention: They enter the theater to see a stage covered with sand—lots and lots of sand. Curiously, this sandy location appears to be indoors, as the set also includes a window on one side of the stage and doors on the other two. The play itself, however, may not stir the audience’s attention or curiosity—at least not for the full hour and 40 minutes (without intermission) of its running time. While Sandblasted features impassioned performances and some lovely two-person scenes, it tends toward the talky and abstruse.

Click for print friendly PDF version of this blog post