Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.
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.
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.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Sashay away? Nah, in Little House on the Ferry the drag queen tap-dances—and it’s just one of the old-fashioned musical-theater pleasures of this exuberant production, described in promotional material as an “immersive nightclub musical.”
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
Neither the script nor the program for People of the Book states when the play takes place, so presumably it is the present. That makes Yussef El Guindi's drama not only morally and logically confused but dated as well. It treats the fight against the Iraqi insurgency, a U.S. military action that ceased about a decade ago, as a current event.
Why should one have to go to the movies to see uncommonly attractive people flirt, fall in love, botch their relationship, have their heart broken but maybe live happily ever after anyway? Playwright Douglas Lyons has brought that beloved cinematic staple, the romantic comedy, to the stage with Table 17.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Fans of David Letterman may recall when he used to send a costumed staffer out to New York streets for stunts like “Can a Guy in a Bear Suit Hail a Cab?” and “Can a Guy in a Bear Suit Get into a Strip Club?” As in those sketches, someone wearing a bear costume makes incongruous appearances during The Slow Dance by Lisi DeHaas—except this time the question is “Can a person in a bear suit liven up an emotionally and narratively deficient drama?”
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.
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.
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.
The main character in Rachel Bonds’ new drama Jonah is not Jonah but Ana, a young woman portrayed from age 16 into her 30s by Gabby Beans, who’s on stage for the entire play. Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) is in only the first third, except for a brief reappearance near the end. The play peaks during those early scenes, which are charming and funny, then gets increasingly talky and disturbing in the post-Jonah scenes.
This time of year it may seem that every holiday tradition from around the world has been commodified in the United States, but one that hasn’t caught on is the British panto, a comic family entertainment widely produced throughout the U.K. at Christmastime. Happenstance Theater, the Washington, D.C.–based troupe behind Adrift, doesn’t name panto as one of the many influences on its quirky and clever show, but there are similarities: a vaudevillian essence, British accents, physical comedy, musical interludes, commedia dell’arte–type characters, audience participation, elaborate costumes, a touch of the ribald.
Watching somebody you love die is terrible. Watching somebody you don’t care about die is a whole other type of painful—one you can experience at ’Til Death, a muddled new drama in which the estimable Judy Kaye plays terminal cancer patient Mary Gorman.
By this point, the plays of Qui Nguyen are starting to look like “seen one, seen them all.” From his earliest productions, for downtown theater troupe Vampire Cowboys, Nguyen’s works have their hallmarks: comic-book-style scenic design, martial arts, superhero and pop-culture fandom. The playwright has often been acclaimed for inventive storytelling and stagecraft. But now that he’s deployed the same gimmicks in play after play, their novelty has worn off. In Poor Yella Rednecks, Nguyen’s latest show to debut in New York, they seem obtrusive. The play is solidly plotted, with thoughtful, moving dialogue scenes. It could shed all the whiz-bang surrealities and still be a worthwhile, entertaining dramedy.
