Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
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.
“Do you all eat grapes?” James Hindman asks, proffering a bowl of green grapes at the outset of his one-man show, What Doesn’t Kill You, directed by Suzanne Barabas, artistic director of the New Jersey Repertory Company, where this show began its theatrical life. And while Hindman perhaps doesn’t want anyone to leap to their feet and grab a grape, this kind of seemingly non-rhetorical question is part of the audience intimacy he develops throughout the piece (and indeed some audience members did call out at various prompts, though no one took a grape). Hindman’s friendly, casual style establishes rapport, and once everyone is comfortable, he becomes a tour guide on his personal journey into and out of a New Jersey hospital, after suffering the kind of heart attack that one nurse refers to as the “widow maker.”
David Finnigan’s performance piece on the climate crisis, Deep History, now playing at the Public Theater after stops elsewhere, including the Edinburgh Fringe, will inevitably be compared to a TED talk: Finnigan is scientifically fluent and uses images from his laptop (video design by Hayley Egan) to craft a deeply informed narrative of climate and human history, with some autobiography and whimsy mixed in. TED talks can be engaging, of course, and Finnigan is certainly that; but this description also sells Finnigan short. There is theatricality at work in the 65-minute piece, directed by Annette Mees, particularly a twist in the storytelling that revolves around the gap between 2019 (when the piece was written) and the time when it is performed.
At first glance, Hannah Gadsby’s Woof! feels like a show strung together with seemingly disparate threads, starting with the performer’s entrance on to the stage at the Abrons Arts Center’s Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, where Gadsby, who uses they as a pronoun of choice, opens the show with a statement about whales, of all things. The topics Gadsby covers range from popular culture to sociopolitical commentary to gender-identity politics. A newcomer to the comedian’s work might wonder how Gadsby would eventually tie these thoughts together, but their stand-ups often veer more toward TED Talk territory than a traditional stand-up structure. Still, as Gadsby promises the audience of Woof! at one point, there is a theme to all this.
June is Pride month, and in theater one can expect a smattering of shows geared toward the LGBTQIA+ community. Even OpenTable has a guide to drag brunches—they are apparently a thing. Capitalizing on the June celebration is Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!, featuring three one-acts written by Joey Merlo and starring Charlene Incarnate, who plays Midnight Coleslaw. If OpenTable were listing it, the 55-minute show would only qualify as a side dish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Toward the beginning of the new solo show Less Lonely, writer and star Jes Tom explains:
Usually when I do comedy, I come out on stage, I do a bit that goes “Hi. I’m Jes, my pronouns are they/them, I like when people call me ‘they,’ it makes me feel less lonely. Like someone can be like, ‘That’s Jes, they’re gonna go smoke a spliff,’ and it sounds like I had a friend.”
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.
In her new solo show, A Good Day to Me Not to You, writer and star Lameece Issaq plays a wonderful, quirky, neurotic aunt—the type who makes you feel safe. It’s a character (identified only as Narrator) who is at odds with her situation in the play: according to a shaman, she carries “a spiritual infection” that has metastasized to her body, in the form of genital warts, or possibly from her body to her soul—it’s in both, and presents itself in a fear of sex, a fear of loneliness, and the Narrator’s withdrawal from the messiness of life to a nunnery. Even there, her life isn’t completely without angst—she meets a deranged woman, who greets her with “A good day to me, not to you.”
Hershey Felder, the pianist and actor who has embodied musicians such as George Gershwin and Ludwig van Beethoven in previous shows, is Fryderyk Chopin in his latest stage biography, Monsieur Chopin, directed by Joel Zwick. In the script he has written, Felder climbs into the skin of Chopin, and reveals both the highs and lows of the 19th-century Polish pianist-composer’s life and career.
Geoff Sobelle’s Food at BAM Fisher is performance art of the most engaging kind. It provokes rumination about man’s relationship to nature, to the use of the environment, and to the distance between tilling the earth with dirty hands and the meal that arrives on a plate at home or in a restaurant. If that implies an overly serious purpose, it is brightened by Sobelle’s interactivity with his audience, his deft sleight of hand, and slapstick that veers into carnival sideshow.
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.
New lives that spring from trauma can often take surprising turns. The people who may seem most likely to be permanently damaged can demonstrate the ability to heal, be empathetic, to love, and even to forgive. The indomitable spirit of Helena Weinrauch, whose world was brutally torn apart in occupied Poland during World War II, is reflected viscerally, visually, and poetically in A Will to Live, Kirk Gostkowki’s adaptation of Weinrauch’s 2008 memoir.
Actress-playwright-comedian Nancy Redman has returned to the Chain Studio Theatre for the third run of her one-woman show, A Séance with Mom. Directed by Austin Pendleton, the piece is performed on a bare stage, with only a chair, small table, and walker at its side. Its six characters are conjured up by Redman with her expressive voice, elastic face, and physical comedy. Redman, who has been described as a cross-fertilization of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, steers clear of politics, preferring to take a deep dive into family relationships and the human condition.
Going to a solo show that is set up as a memorial service might not sound like a particularly inviting theatrical experience during the dog days of summer. But A Eulogy for Roman, written and performed by the beguiling Brendan George, proves that saying farewell to a childhood friend doesn’t have to be an occasion for tears but can be a time for making new promises.
“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.
