Playwright Sarah Ruhl and performance-artist Taylor Mac, both recipients of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” and past finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are currently at the Signature Theatre for a revival of Ruhl’s 1998 adaptation of Orlando, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. Mac, who’s playing the title role, is renowned as a dramatist but, on this occasion, serves strictly as an actor.
At the outset of Ife Olujobi’s Jordans, a surreal comic-horror satire of racial capitalism and its effects on Black bodies, Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), a Black receptionist at a fashionable event space/production facility, essentially builds the stylish, gleaming set (designed by Matt Saunders). This activity is one of many moments in director Whitney White’s sleek production when Jordan’s unceasing labor in the face of disregard or outright hostility from her all-white co-workers is highlighted. Later, when Jordan’s colleague Emma (Brontë England-Nelson) says in a presentation to their wicked boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), that the women at the firm are “slaving away,” she explicitly does not include Jordan in her statement.
The title of Lia Romeo’s play Still, it must be clarified, is unrelated to manufacturing moonshine in the mountains of Appalachia. Rather, her wistful two-hander is about seniors reconnecting—the kind of story that pops up periodically in bridal pages about two spouses whose longtime partners have died and who have somehow reconnected with their youthful heartthrobs. The stories carry an inherent charm, one that is aided immeasurably by two superb performers, Jayne Atkinson and Tim Daly.
In addition to introducing the word robot to the English language, Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi drama R.U.R. depicted a dystopian world in which scientifically manufactured laborers gradually eradicate humans. The play perfectly captured the anxieties of the burgeoning Machine Age and was a big hit on Broadway in 1922. S. Asher Gelman’s Scarlett Dreams attempts to tap into similar uneasiness as the former Information Age settles into the current Age of Intelligence. With the meteoric advancement and sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), the play suggests that it may be just a matter of time when people will be controlled by digital avatars, and the difference between reality and virtual reality (VR) will become purely conjectural.
Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in the 1960s by Irish playwright Brian Friel, poignantly captures the anticipation, fear, and excitement of emigrating to a new place. Set on the eve of departure, Friel’s play focuses on Gar, the would-be émigré, in both his Public self (played with subdued melancholy by David McElwee) as he struggles with his decision to leave, and his Private self (played with exuberance by A.J. Shively), screaming to get out. It’s deadly boring in Ballybeg, a tiny little corner of County Donegal, Ireland, where the most exciting things are a game of checkers and memories of teenage shenanigans.
Part coming-of-age story, part domestic drama, and part mystery tale, Jordan Seavey’s The Seven Year Disappear is a deeply unsettling work that ponders the thorny question: How far should an artist go to mine his or her life for art? Directed by Scott Elliott, Seavey’s play reveals the darker side of the art world, when a renowned artist disappears for seven years and her son goes into free fall.
A Sign of the Times, a new jukebox romp featuring musical riffs and cultural rifts from the 1960s, is full of statements. It has something to say about civil rights, women’s liberation, Vietnam, the course of true love and the influence of Pop Art. But this York Theatre Company production also leaves behind some nagging questions. Can a musical be “woke” when its book is tired? Can stock characters find believable ways to bond? Was Petula Clark right that things will be great when you’re downtown?
The Ally is eminently watchable, although it seems like it shouldn’t be. Unless, that is, you go to the theater to be lectured on geopolitical issues. Itamar Moses’ new drama runs more than 2½ hours, and you might feel like you spend about two hours of it watching one character, who’s speaking to another person on stage, deliver a speech that elucidates a stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, complete with historical references, geographical context, statistics and preemptive rebuttals.
Pericles, the first of Shakespeare’s late romances, is the only play not in the First Folio. Most critics agree that the first two acts are by someone else, possibly the work of George Wilkins, who wrote the “prose narrative” on which the play is based, and from which Fiasco Theater’s galloping production sometimes borrows. But the last three acts are the Bard, and this play, even though Ben Jonson called it “a mouldy tale,” has proven resilient.
Deadly Stages, a new murder mystery–melodrama by Marc Castle and Mark Finley, is a strange pastiche. It follows backstage shenanigans that involve a temperamental grande dame of the theater, a younger, theatrically untrained movie star, and assorted hangers-on: the reliable supporting actor, the producer, the director, and possibly a scheming upstart. Anyone who hasn’t seen All About Eve should begin to prepare now.
The personal is political. This familiar adage is one of the points Deb Margolin makes in the awkwardly staged and often pretentious-sounding play This Is Not a Time of Peace. Other points: History repeats itself. We are the sum total of everything we’ve experienced. Beware despots. Professional ambition can clash with personal ethics. Time does not heal everything. Trumpism equals McCarthyism.
The Qiao sisters, Qing and Wan, have not been well known outside Chinese history. They first appeared as minor characters in the 14th-century Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Since then, they have turned up as supporting characters in the Chinese opera Fenghuang Er Qiao and, most recently, as protagonists of movies like John Woo’s Red Cliff (2008) and the video game Dynasty Warriors. For Warrior Sisters of Wu, Damon Chu draws on their shared mythology but also on Much Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice. While Chua’s writing doesn’t reach the literary heights of Shakespeare or Austen, his acknowledgment of the rich cultural heritage and archetypes ranging from ancient China to 19th-century England root Warrior Sisters in dramatic material that promises the best that hundreds of years of storytelling have to offer.
Marc Summers may not be a name that rings a bell to most people, although he has hosted numerous cable-television shows, most notably Double Dare (1986–88) on the Nickelodeon network. The participants in that game show for kids invariably ended up covered in goop, schmutz, and slime. The title The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers pays tribute to that calling card, but it also reveals the celebrity’s battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a malady that he has had since childhood.
Sunset Baby begins with Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), a legend of the Black Liberation Movement who has spent time in prison for robbing an armored truck, speaking hesitantly into a camcorder—the video feed is projected above the stage—about the uncertainties of fatherhood: “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable.” Just how complicated it is in his particular case is soon revealed when he tries to reunite with his estranged daughter, Nina (Moses Ingram), a woman who has built a hard, protective shell around herself and does not want to hear a whiff of nostalgia from a man she barely knows. She doesn’t even want Kenyatta to say her name: “Do not say my name as if you’ve said it a hundred times. As if we have this familiarity between us. We are not familiar. We are not close.”
A sign in the lobby of Theater 555 says: “Warning: This performance features theatrical haze, flashing lights, and closeted Republicans.” And the set by David Goldstein that greets the audience is a gleefully tacky, Vegas-esque sea of silver tinsel streamers, with a “Make America SLAY Again” banner above. It all primes one for a good time. And then Five: the Parody Musical half-delivers.
Theatergoers who have followed the career of the late Tina Howe now have an opportunity to see her final work, Where Women Go, a triptych of one-acts that invites one on an absurdist journey through New York City. Directed by Aimée Hayes, this intimate work has some transcendent moments, but its poetic flights are too often thwarted by its gimmick-driven scenarios.
Much of the audience at The Christine Jorgensen Show seemed to be, as the phrase goes, of a certain age, and maybe that’s understandable. Who under 60 knows who Christine Jorgensen was? Yet for a time in the 1950s she was, as a character says in Donald Steven Olson’s play with music, “one of the most famous human beings in the world.”
On Set with Theda Bara is a single-actor comedy-drama by Joey Merlo that revolves around the suspicious disappearance of a genderqueer teenager. In this pastiche of film noir, Merlo piles mystery upon outlandish mystery, and David Greenspan leads the spectators (limited to 50 a performance) through a 65-minute, mazelike tale that’s at once intriguing and mystifying.
A program note by Corinne Jaber, the playwright who is making her debut with Munich Medea: Happy Family, says that her work is meant to “shine light into places that are difficult to look at” and not “judge nor accuse, but to reveal.” She accomplishes that, but the story line of her fairly static, albeit well-cast, play feels like one we’ve (unfortunately) seen before. At this point, more than 25 years after How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer Prize, sexual abuse is no longer a novel subject for the stage.
A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.
Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm at the Vineyard Theatre is a nightmare version of an office sitcom, set during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Quirky worker bees perform evil tasks while navigating interpersonal relationships and an ever-present authoritarian state looming over them, in the form of Vladimir Putin’s portrait on the wall and an armed soldier keeping watch. The professional Internet trolls in St. Petersburg, at the benignly named Internet Research Agency, send out vast numbers of tweets and posts using fake accounts—a “mix of celebrities, eggs, fake individuals, and pundits”—to disseminate misinformation. In almost every case, Gancher uses real Russian troll tweets, a documentary reality that makes the set-up even more nightmarish.
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.
Those reflecting on history often use a wide brush and focus on major figures to the exclusion of perhaps less renowned but significant players. Hitler, the Nazi war machine, and concentration camps are front of mind as regards World War II in Europe, but how many people remember dissidents and resistance from within Germany? The White Rose, one such resistance group, presented a credible threat to Nazi lies, propaganda, and blind devotion to the Führer. Brian Belding’s White Rose: The Musical is an homage to some of those “good Germans” who risked their lives and paid the ultimate price for defying Hitler and his henchmen.
Whether the 2004 low-budget horror film Saw has left enough of a cultural footprint on the public to warrant a musical parody is for audiences to decide. Saw the Musical, a send-up of the original Saw, with a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and music and lyrics by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis, certainly doesn’t provide any evidence of it.
There are few theatrical experiences more thrilling than witnessing a new play catch fire and mesmerize an audience. That experience is now to be had at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, where British playwright Ruby Thomas’s airtight 80-minute drama, The Animal Kingdom, is making its U.S. premiere. Tautly directed by Jack Serio, it’s a show that is emotionally gripping and ultimately redemptive.
