In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
It’s no surprise that the Trump era and its aftermath have been a boon to documentary plays. These plays don’t all address explicitly political topics, and they vary widely from one another in tone, method, and approach; but hovering over this era’s documentary plays is the relentless assault being waged on the idea of truth, on the very nature of reality itself, and the uncertainty over whether our society and institutions will persevere.
Meet your new mother-in-law, Beiv (Kate Mulgrew): she’s Ireland’s “great feminist artist” who lives on a remote island off the coast of West Cork, has an acerbic wit and an imperious manner, a penchant for knocking down the walls of her house, a strained relationship with her son, and may have murdered her husband. Oh, and she didn’t know her son was married until you showed up with him from San Francisco. This is the situation that 23-year-old Bonnie (Ayana Workman) finds herself in at the outset of Nancy Harris’s overstuffed mystery The Beacon, which was commissioned by Druid Theatre Company and now arrives at the Irish Rep after a 2019 run at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
Arlene Hutton’s abortion-rights drama Blood of the Lamb arrives at an unusually timely moment. In the last few days NBC News has reported that maternal deaths in Texas increased 56% between 2019 and 2022, a period that includes the 2021 ban on abortion care in the state. Although Margot Bordelon says in her director’s note that the play began as a work of “speculative fiction,” the serendipity is a boon. The underlying story feels alarmingly real.
When the program comes with a glossary, that can be a trouble sign. The glossary for The Witness Room, Pedro Antonio Garcia’s drama-with-some-laughs, runs to three pages. So much legalese—J-D Redcap, Three and a C, Chomo—how much will an audience member be able to understand? And for the first several minutes, it’s a struggle to figure out what the heck’s going on in set designer Daniel Allen’s cluttered witness room. Stick around, though, and the narrative becomes clearer. And what follows is a compelling peek into the lives and interactions of NYPD cops, their legal maneuverings in pretrial, and how slippery their moral code can get.
Matthew Freeman’s play The Ask seems deceptively simple on the surface and remains so for quite a while. Two women are meeting in an Upper West Side apartment. The older woman is a well-known photographer, and coffee-table art books (Alice Neel, e.g.) lie on the floor of her apartment; photographs (by Cindy Sherman, among others) adorn the walls. Craig Napoliello’s impressively detailed set evokes solid wealth—the reason the younger woman is paying a call.
Life and Trust, a new theatrical event from Emursive, which produced the Punchdrunk hit Sleep No More, takes as its inspiration the Faust legend and mixes it with the 1929 stock market crash, the structure of A Christmas Carol, and glimmers of Citizen Kane. As with Sleep No More, attendees wear masks and performers do not, and silence is the rule. The audience, too, plays a part: The evening begins in a cavernous lobby with red-marble columns at “Conwell Tower” (formerly City Bank–Farmers Trust), half a block from Delmonico’s in lower Manhattan. A placard announces the date, Oct. 23, 1929, and the event: Life and Trust Bank’s Prospective Investors’ Fête. The audience is the “investors.”
Technology is being used more, and more inventively, in scenic and production design for the theater. Social media has become a vital part of marketing—and occasionally casting—shows. But tech has yet to make a big impression in theater as a subject. Three decades into the 21st century, plays about life in the digital age are still scarce. (Maybe that’s why Job, which recently transferred to Broadway, hit a nerve.)
Perhaps the first thing to clarify about Odd Man Out is that Martín Bondone’s play is unrelated to the 1947 movie by British director Carol Reed that starred James Mason as a robber on the run in Belfast. Although Reed’s work is a famous film noir, Bondone’s Odd Man Out is more than noir—it’s performed in total darkness.
Considering it has a cast of two, The Meeting: The Interpreter is a very busy production. The actors, Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, move all over the stage—standing here, kneeling there, spinning around in wheeled chairs, dancing a little—and Curran, who plays multiple characters, repeatedly switches her costume or wig. Video, puppets, sound effects and a slew of props are also part of the action.
Doménica Feraud’s new play is set in a grief support group, where members reminisce about the “someone spectacular” they’ve lost and figure out how to cope without them. This should be very moving, but instead it seems trite and formulaic.
Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered a pillar of modern drama. To say Phillip Howze’s new play Six Characters deconstructs it would be a massive understatement, as Howze pours a bewildering array of ideas and scenarios into his homage.
Sam Collier’s A Hundred Circling Camps arrives at Atlantic Stage 2 as part of Dogteam Theatre Project’s inaugural season, under the aegis of Middlebury College in Vermont. Directed by Rebecca Wear, and with impressive ensemble acting, the production underscores the power of public protest.
Ryan Spahn’s Inspired by True Events is an amalgamation of docudrama, backstage comedy, psychological thriller, and immersive theater. The boundaries between the genres often blur, and the effect is often comical, sometimes chilling, and occasionally disorienting. The production’s fun-house quality is encapsulated in the paradoxical and droll preshow announcement: “The following story you’re about to witness is inspired by true events. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, streamlined to 90 minutes and staged outdoors by Classical Theatre of Harlem, is as cool and fizzy as a glass of Prosecco. Judging by the wild guffaws and applause on opening night, the zanies who populate this most fanciful of Shakespeare’s comedies (embodied by a top-flight cast of youthful New York actors) kept a steady hold on playgoers’ attention, despite the distraction of sirens punctuating the Bard’s iambic pentameter, helicopters overhead, and heat only slightly below the day’s high of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At a dramatic moment, an explosion of amateur fireworks just outside the amphitheater added a fortuitous burst of red and orange to the twilit sky, eliciting a gasp of audience amusement.
There’s perhaps just enough time until the 2024 election that a play about internecine strife among Democrats can be palatable rather than infuriating. In fact, Mario Correa’s N/A, a battle of ideas between N (Holland Taylor), the first woman Speaker of the House, and the insurgent A (Ana Villafañe), the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing (minus the walking). Staging this play in the fall, on the eve of the election, would have been sadistic; in the election’s aftermath it might feel like an afterthought. So the moment is ripe to watch two fiercely intelligent, trailblazing women debate their ideals and approaches to wielding power.
In Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, the time is 1759, and the residents of a rural English community have one eye on the sky—welkin is an archaic word for heaven—for the appearance of Halley’s Comet. It’s a rare occurrence that takes their minds off their hardscrabble 18th-century lives.
The skirmish of wits between Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick takes on a modern spin in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in 1940s Italy. Director Thomas G. Waites utilizes the unflagging energy of a rotating cast from Waites TGW studio to fire up Shakespeare’s romantic comedy.
Following its co-commission of Public Obscenities, a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Drama, NAATCO—the National Asian American Theatre Company—leans even more heavily into the theme of gender identity with its new production Isabel, an adventurous but impenetrable 70-minute drama by Reid Tang.
Dark Noon, the South African-devised history of the American West now visiting Brooklyn from the Edinburgh Festival, foregrounds violence by white Europeans against blacks, Asians, and native Americans to debunk the mythology of America established by heroes in film westerns. The title deliberately references High Noon (1952), but the piece belongs to the “in yer face” school of theater, established in Britain in the 1990s. Although “slapstick humor” is billed as one element of the production, the send-up is a heavy-handed attack on the depredations of Manifest Destiny.
What happens when the adults of a town ignore the wisdom of their children? That’s the haunting question underlying Amina Henry’s new adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Directed by Michole Biancosino, Henry’s play retools the myth, emphasizing the natural virtues possessed by children. Replete with song, dance, and a 10-member ensemble who double as rats, this take on the legend reveals surprising depths.
