Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
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.
The afterlife of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was as brilliant as his failed life of train and bank robbery was bleak. In the new musical Dead Outlaw, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna (music and lyrics), and Itamar Moses (book) team up with director David Cromer to tell the true story of a turn-of-the-century outlaw who became a famous carnival attraction after his untimely death.
So why is Rebecca Gilman’s new drama called Swing State? Granted, it takes place in rural Wisconsin, in the recent past, when COVID shots were novelties and the Delta variant was lurking. But there’s not a lot political going on among her four principals, beyond a general head-butting between Peg (Mary Beth Fisher), the liberal, nature-loving recent widow occupying Todd Rosenthal’s hyperrealistic prairie home set, and the more traditionalist, presumably Trump-loving denizens around her. (Gratefully, the man himself rates only one mention.) In fact, when you get down to it, there’s really not a lot of anything going on.
A few months ago Merriam-Webster declared gaslighting 2022’s word of the year. It’s a word with origins in the theater—inspired by the title of a 1938 play, which was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Gaslighting returns to the theater with Lucy, Erica Schmidt’s intriguing new drama in which a nanny seems to be playing mind games with the mother who hires her.
Comedian Faith Salie’s new solo show Approval Junkie, based on her book of the same title, is funny, insightful and heartfelt. Salie is an Emmy Award–winning journalist best known for her roles on NPR's Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and CBS Sunday Morning. In her one-woman show, Salie begins with the adolescent need to seek approval. Her play explores the concept of the human need to be accepted and even revered.
