There’s perhaps just enough time until the 2024 election that a play about internecine strife among Democrats can be palatable rather than infuriating. In fact, Mario Correa’s N/A, a battle of ideas between N (Holland Taylor), the first woman Speaker of the House, and the insurgent A (Ana Villafañe), the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing (minus the walking). Staging this play in the fall, on the eve of the election, would have been sadistic; in the election’s aftermath it might feel like an afterthought. So the moment is ripe to watch two fiercely intelligent, trailblazing women debate their ideals and approaches to wielding power.
In Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, the time is 1759, and the residents of a rural English community have one eye on the sky—welkin is an archaic word for heaven—for the appearance of Halley’s Comet. It’s a rare occurrence that takes their minds off their hardscrabble 18th-century lives.
The skirmish of wits between Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick takes on a modern spin in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in 1940s Italy. Director Thomas G. Waites utilizes the unflagging energy of a rotating cast from Waites TGW studio to fire up Shakespeare’s romantic comedy.
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.
Dark Noon, the South African-devised history of the American West now visiting Brooklyn from the Edinburgh Festival, foregrounds violence by white Europeans against blacks, Asians, and native Americans to debunk the mythology of America established by heroes in film westerns. The title deliberately references High Noon (1952), but the piece belongs to the “in yer face” school of theater, established in Britain in the 1990s. Although “slapstick humor” is billed as one element of the production, the send-up is a heavy-handed attack on the depredations of Manifest Destiny.
When Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods opened in 1988 at the Lucille Lortel Theater and then moved to Broadway, Ronald Reagan was President and the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed. Blessing’s two-character play about a Russian and an American diplomat discussing arms reduction in a series of meetings in Geneva was fresh and timely—and splendidly acted by Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky.
Scott Organ’s opening scene for The Thing With Feathers is deceptively creepy for anyone attuned to the dangers of the Internet. A young girl, Anna (Alexa Shae Niziak), is sitting on her bed, with paperwork around her, and she’s talking to a man named Eric—someone she has never met. They have clearly bonded online over poetry, particularly Emily Dickinson. They recite stanzas of Dickinson’s “Life” to each other: “For each ecstatic instant/We must an anguish pay/In keen and quivering ratio/To the ecstasy.” The voice gently probes elements of her home life and her relationship with her mother. The scene promises a literate, solidly structured drama, and it delivers.
