Reviews

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The Actors

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The Actors

Boundaries of all types are tested in Ronnie Larsen’s comedic and big-hearted family chronicle, The Actors. The line between Democrat and Republican is pulled taut, as is the division between atheist and religious believer. But those are relatively minor concerns for the playwright. More to the point are the boundaries of grief and how to break through them, the borders of what constitutes a family, and what limits stage actors might burst through when their roles take over their lives. As farcical as it is melancholy, there are as many surprise door knocks in the play’s two acts and two hours as there are woeful revelations. 

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The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria

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The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria

Near the end of the Barry Manilow musical Harmony, the surviving Comedian Harmonist Ari Leschnikoff, “a Bulgarian singing waiter” who survived the Holocaust to return to his home country, brags to a rabbi: “We saved them, Rabbi! Every Jewish person in Bulgaria! We wouldn’t let them have them! Not one!” This startling declaration, which demanded elaboration, is the foundation of The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria. The story of Boris III might have remained a historical footnote but for Sasha Wilson, the cowriter of the piece (with Joseph Cullen), whose grandparents escaped Bulgaria during World War II. It turns out that the history of Bulgaria in the 20th century is far more complicated than the Harmony passage suggests.

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Staff Meal

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Staff Meal

An underlying anxiety is on display in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal about the appeal of his absurdist play: exhibit A is a character listed as Audience Member in the program (Stephanie Berry), who interrupts the proceedings about 30 minutes into the show to offer a detailed explanation of why she is not pleased:

      Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there? I’d happily watch a play about that—if it was different.
     Take a stand! Inspire action! Touch our hearts—or at least you should try!
     We’ve given this gift to you of our evening—one of our precious few nights on this earth—and you’re showing us this?????

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Lorenzo

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Lorenzo

Ben Target’s solo show Lorenzo is an end-of-life comedy that is both joyful and surprising. Written and performed by Target (pronounced Tar-ZHAY), and directed by Adam Brace and Lee Griffiths, it is an autobiographical 65 minutes that focuses on a time when Target gave up his work as a comedian to become a live-in caretaker for an aging family friend, “Uncle” Lorenzo Wong.

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Orlando

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Orlando

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.

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Jordans

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Jordans

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.

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Still

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Still

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.

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Scarlett Dreams

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Scarlett Dreams

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.

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Philadelphia, Here I Come!

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Philadelphia, Here I Come!

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.

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Macbeth (An Undoing)

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Macbeth (An Undoing)

Theatergoers yearning to see a new spin on Macbeth need look no further than Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing). Written and directed by Harris, it is a feminist version of Shakespeare’s original that puts Lady Macbeth at its center. But while Harris succeeds in expanding Lady Macbeth’s presence in the story, ultimately the playwright is defeated in increasing the character’s agency, given Shakespeare’s clear-cut trajectory of the doomed Queen. 

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Las Borinqueñas

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Las Borinqueñas

Nelson Diaz-Marcano wrote Las Borinqueñas to honor Puerto Rican women, like his mother and grandmothers, who work hard, raise children and serve their communities. But his bilingual play’s awkwardly presented fact-based component—concerning the clinical trials for the first birth control pill, which were conducted in Puerto Rico in the 1950s—seems to get in the way of his affectionate personal portrait.

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The Hummingbirds

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The Hummingbirds

The fun thing about writing a fantasy set in the future or in some alternate universe is, of course, you get to make up your own rules. Garret Jon Groenveld’s The Hummingbirds, a dystopian fantasy set in a future of indeterminate distance, has been kicking around for a decade or so, but it is currently making its New York debut at the Chain Theatre. Groenveld depicts a highly regulated society, yet a violent and anarchic one, and it’s debatable whether we’ve moved closer to such an environment since he wrote it. But no question, the man has imagination, and his vision is efficiently presented in a well-staged, well-acted little production.

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Teeth

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Teeth

Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s new musical Teeth has bite. Adapted from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 cult horror-comedy film of the same name and directed by Sarah Benson, Teeth is a tongue-in-cheek look at sex, shame, religious repression, and more. The story revolves around a devout evangelical teen named Dawn who discovers she has a secret weapon: vagina dentata (Latin for “toothed vagina”), which swings into action when she is sexually threatened.  

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Fish

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Fish

The broken pieces of public education are laid bare in Fish, a world premiere drama by Kia Corthron presented by the Keen Company. Set in an unnamed high school, the play captures the ails of urban education, the poverty-stricken neighborhoods in which they sit, and the resulting challenges students experience as they try to keep their heads above water.

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KING

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KING

In Ireland’s County Cork there are apparently many ghosts. Nasty ghosts. KING (an acronym for Keep Ignoring Nasty Ghosts) posits that ghosts of the past have a central role in the way we live our present—and future. Fishamble, a Dublin-based theater showcase for new Irish plays, has produced this work, which features a solo performance by Pat Kinevane, a veteran associate of the company. Director Jim Cullerton has shaped it into a powerful but enigmatic and often disturbing reflection on obsession, mental illness, England’s domination of Ireland and its empire, and one man’s attempt to grapple with a litany of wrongs, both past and present.

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Grief Hotel

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Grief Hotel

Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel was part of Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks program, and now comes to the Public Theater for a more extended engagement. This is great news, because the play very much deserves a longer look and wider audience. It is presented in partnership with New Georges, who produce “weird, weird-ish, and often impossible plays”; Grief Hotel is weird—gloriously so—but it’s not impossible. In fact, the strength of the play lies in Birkenmeier’s canny creation of an offbeat yet accessible style, thanks to her sharp ear for dialogue that is fundamentally naturalistic and works in productive combination with the play’s slightly surreal, collage-like structure, directed with bracing clarity by Tara Ahmadinejad.

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Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet

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Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet

Great love and labor has clearly gone into the performance of Eddie Izzard’s 2½-hour solo Hamlet. The adaptation by Mark Izzard (Eddie’s older brother) is generally true to Shakespeare’s text, the split-level set by Tom Piper is wisely uncluttered, and Izzard delivers Shakespeare’s verse with remarkable ease. 

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Corruption

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Corruption

American playwright J. T. Rogers, the author of Oslo, tackles political issues again in Corruption. At first glance, the play’s subject matter looks parochial: the phone-hacking scandal in London in 2010 and 2011. That scandal, in which newspapers belonging to Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch were found to have hacked private phones as well as those of public officials, engulfed newspapers, prime ministers, investigative reporters, and members of Parliament. In Bartlett Sher’s thrilling production, the immersion into British politics comes with numerous parallels to American politics.

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Like They Do in the Movies

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Like They Do in the Movies

Laurence Fishburne’s one-man show, Like They Do in the Movies, arrives at the Perelman Performing Arts Center like a breath of fresh air. Written and performed by Fishburne, and directed by Leonard Foglia, it is a deeply personal performance that is immensely entertaining.

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Brooklyn Laundry

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Brooklyn Laundry

In the new drama Brooklyn Laundry, John Patrick Shanley—both author and director—is toying with the impact of uncanny coincidences on the narrative trajectory of his principal characters. That theme should ring a bell with fans of Moonstruck, the intoxicating 1987 film comedy for which this echt New York playwright won a best original screenplay Oscar.

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