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Colin Macdonald

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The Connector

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The Connector

The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.

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Aristocrats

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Aristocrats

Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is often described as “Chekhovian,” and, indeed, the parallels to The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are unmistakable: three very different sisters of the O’Donnell family, along with their relations and hangers-on, navigate a collapsing estate, literally and figuratively, and grapple with a questionable family legacy and sense of purpose. Aristocrats is the second installment of the Irish Rep’s Friel Project, following an exquisite production of Translations.

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

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Death, Let Me Do My Show

A specter is haunting Rachel Bloom—the specter of death. In fact, Death is sitting in the fifth row of her show, Death, Let Me Do My Show, looking suspiciously like Bloom’s friend David Hull, the “moderately successful actor who seems stuck between leading man and character roles” (as she describes him). And Death insists on being acknowledged, contrary to Bloom’s plan to deliver the show as she conceived it in 2019.

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Unconfined

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Unconfined

Unconfined is a solo theater piece based on real-life events that asks a fundamental question: What does it mean to really know another person? In this case, the question is more difficult than usual, as the person to get to know is on lockdown on death row. The story of a seemingly kind, thoughtful, creative, and spiritually sophisticated convicted murderer came to playwright Liz Richardson’s attention when she “received a binder of extraordinary poems, drawings, and letters by a prisoner who had been on death row for 18 years,” as noted in the program. She wrote the piece based on her own research and interviews. Richardson portrays three characters who all interacted with the unseen, unnamed protagonist while he was imprisoned: Barbara, a professor of comparative religion at a Southern university; Eleanor, an English artist; and a fellow death-row inmate, Benny.

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Covenant

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Covenant

Audience noise is usually a nuisance in the theater: pinging smartphones, the rustling of bags, hacking coughs. York Walker’s Gothic horror play Covenant, however, elicited the more gratifying sounds of audience shrieks and gasps. Wonderfully inventive staging in the tiny Roundabout Underground space and a first-rate ensemble allow shocks and scares to flourish, mostly overcoming some lapses in the writing or plot twists that might not withstand too much scrutiny. Under Tiffany Nichole Greene’s direction, Covenant is genuinely scary, and that it achieves this for an audience inundated with high-budget, digital effects–driven entertainment is a testament to the theatrical craft on display.

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Sabbath’s Theater

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Sabbath’s Theater

Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater is considered outrageous and raunchy even by Rothian standards, with retired, arthritic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath making Alexander Portnoy—the hero of Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which launched his career—look tame by comparison. For Mickey there is no desire for redemption or decency; there is only narcissistic pleasure-seeking, misanthropy, and self-gratification at any cost. All of which begged the question, in a recent New York Times piece on John Turturro and writer Ariel Levy, who co-adapted the novel into a playscript, “Is 2023 ready for Sabbath?”

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Daphne

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Daphne

In “Ballad of a Thin Man” Bob Dylan sings, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is,” a refrain that applies perfectly to Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor), the eponymous character in a new play by Renae Simone Jarrett at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater. Something is certainly happening to Daphne, psychologically and physically, but the uncanny transformation doesn’t obey the conventional rules of time or space, and nothing may be what it seems.

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All the Devils Are Here

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All the Devils Are Here

Patrick Page’s investigation into Shakespeare’s villains is a master class on the Bard and a bravura demonstration of Shakespearean acting. In All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Page brings a lifetime of performing and thinking about Shakespeare to the stage. He inhabits characters running the full range of Shakespeare’s dramatic career and imparts some of the wisdom he has accrued along the way, summoning evil spirits one moment and serving as congenial, good-natured, and charismatic host into the heart of darkness the next.

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Partnership

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Partnership

An advantageous business offer, with a loveless marriage thrown in: this is one of the would-be “partnerships” around which Elizabeth Baker’s 1917 drama Partnership, a feminist parable and Romantic cri de coeur in the guise of a comedy of manners, revolves. As is so often the case with the plays that the Mint Theater Company rescues from obscurity, the issues are both historically specific and still relevant. Must the demands of business always be at odds with personal nourishment? Should one prize practicality or love? Does respectability entail a life of drudgery, while a life well lived means being branded as “mad”?

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Dig

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Dig

The plant-store setting of Theresa Rebeck’s play Dig might be reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors, but in Dig the plants are the victims, not the aggressors—victims of human selfishness, anger, and desire. For Roger (Jeffrey Bean), the tightly wound owner of the store (which is named Dig), the damage done to plants is more keenly felt than the damage human beings do to others or to themselves; and it is also more easily addressed, as Roger is a master of restoring vitality and life to seemingly doomed plants. With people, he’d really rather not be bothered.

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Infinite Life

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Infinite Life

Annie Baker makes her much-anticipated return to Off-Broadway with the world premiere of Infinite Life, a coproduction with Britain’s National Theatre. The play, once titled On the Uses of Pain for Life, was slated for Fall 2021 at Signature Theatre, but it never materialized; Baker’s most recent play, The Antipodes, was produced at Signature in 2017. It takes only a few moments of Infinite Life’s halting and delightfully awkward opening exchange for Baker to captivate with her uncanny blend of the naturalistic and the absurd, honing in on human frailty with a merciless yet empathetic eye, this time trained on patients at an alternative pain clinic in Northern California.

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Uncle Vanya

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Uncle Vanya

Director Jack Serio’s intimate staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had a brief run in July at a private loft in the Flatiron District (16 nights, with 40 spectators per night), and has now returned for a few weeks at a different loft in the same neighborhood. The original run cultivated a buzz of exclusivity—“sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it,” as described in the New Yorker. The impression that you have been granted entrée to an event persists in the encore engagement: the program given to the relatively few (but more than 40) audience members includes a countdown of how many performances remain.

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Primary Trust

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Primary Trust

Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Fiasco Theater, in a joint production with Red Bull Theater, takes on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was a flop when it premiered in 1607. Though it has been occasionally revived, the play is mostly of scholarly interest: Beaumont is best-known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as writer-in-residence of the King’s Men, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle is Beaumont’s only play written alone. If the comedy doesn’t offer up the richness or complexity of Shakespeare, Fiasco is clearly drawn to its story of topsy-turvy community-building through theater.

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Love

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Love

Alexander Zeldin’s Love is a remarkably naturalistic and empathetic work about individuals and families experiencing homelessness. The play takes place in an emergency housing facility in London and was created in collaboration with those who have firsthand experience of such a setting. Zeldin writes in a program note that “a crucial step in the creation of Love was meeting these families, visiting their homes over two years, involving them in workshops and rehearsals, and improvising with them on the subjects and scenes in the play.”

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Letters from Max, a ritual

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Letters from Max, a ritual

Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual, is an adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, which included letters between Ruhl and Max Ritvo, her playwriting student and, shortly thereafter, friend. Ritvo died at age 25, of a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric cancer first diagnosed when he was 16. He graduated from college while undergoing chemotherapy and surgeries, producing poetry and plays and music along the way, becoming a teacher to Ruhl as much as she was to him.

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A Bright New Boise

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A Bright New Boise

Samuel D. Hunter creates worlds of complexity and heartbreak in the most banal settings. A Bright New Boise, which premiered in 2010 at The Wild Project and is now making its off-Broadway debut at Signature Theatre as part of Hunter’s Premiere Residency, takes place in the windowless break room of a Hobby Lobby in Boise, Idaho. Under Oliver Butler’s skillful direction, with a strong ensemble and remarkable lead performance by Peter Mark Kendall, Hunter’s characters engage in a desperate search for meaning in ways funny, painful, and devastating.

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Endgame

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Endgame

John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin starring in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic masterpiece Endgame: it’s hard to imagine a more appealing combination. Thompson is perhaps the greatest classical actor of his generation, and Irwin one of the world’s premier interpreters of Beckett, as anyone who witnessed his master class On Beckett (which, like Endgame, played at the Irish Repertory Theatre) can attest. The production, anchored in two brilliant performances and under Ciarán O’Reilly’s precise and elegantly understated direction, exceeds even lofty expectations, perfectly capturing the play’s absurd, macabre comedy without sacrificing its haunting bleakness.

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You Will Get Sick

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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.”

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Chester Bailey

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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.

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