The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
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.
Daniel’s Husband is one of those plays where, halfway through, something so unexpected, plot-altering, and tone-shifting happens that it just can’t be revealed. Michael McKeever’s comedy-drama about the still-new era of gay marriage is cleft in two—part one: comedy, part two: drama—and both halves are effective, if you’re willing to accept some questionable behavior on the part of the title character.
Desperation courses through Adam Strauss’s performance in The Mushroom Cure. The solo show, which he has written and stars in, details his battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and his attempts to find help. It’s a serious subject: the illness preys on the mind of its victims, allowing them no assurance that what they’re doing at any given moment is the right thing. It keeps them on a psychological yo-yo, and can impair their ability to form lasting relationships. Yet Strauss, a stand-up comedian, tells his story with humor as well, as the best playwrights do for serious material. (The piece won an Overall Excellence Award for Solo Performance at the New York Fringe Festival.)
The Mushroom Cureis structured as a series of scenes, with Strauss playing varying characters. Sometimes Strauss is the host, sitting on a vermilion swivel chair and speaking to us about his drug dealer, Slo. The chair also serves as office furniture when Strauss seeks help from a bizarre psychotherapist who turns out to have post-traumatic stress disorder. (A scene when they meet for a session in Tompkins Square Park is very funny.)
Strauss is becomingly ordinary, with his mop of black hair itself displaying some disorder, but less than his personality provides. He works up the courage to speak to a pretty young woman named Grace in a bar. She’s from Kansas, and he envisions her as innocent and not quite beautiful but acceptable. His waffling is a subtle indicator of the OCD at a mild stage. In any case, they have a one-night stand, and he finds he wants to see more of her, but she has only been visiting New York and is leaving for California. Stepping out of the present, Adam speaks of the ex-girlfriend Annie who left him, and reveals that Grace is the first woman who has slept over since Annie.
His relationship with Grace leads Strauss to search ever more desperately for biochemical relief for his disorder. He has already read about psilocybin mushrooms in a psychiatric journal—Grace is conveniently also studying medicine, and supports him. The article relates that some people have found their OCD entirely eliminated after the mushroom cure, so he has tried to order them through his marijuana dealer, Slo. But mushrooms are nowhere to be had; there’s a shortage.
Strauss then embarks on a series of other cures. He tries strange white powders ordered from China, and they arrive in plastic bags coded with numbers and letters. As each new avenue opens up, he gets jumpier and more fraught with anxiety.
In his search for relief, Strauss also tries cacti, as he and Grace get out of the city to a sojourn on Martha’s Vineyard, in a segment that’s particularly evocative and poetic. They see shrimp larvae misting in the moonlight by the shore. But Strauss’s OCD still has hold of him, and Grace’s patience with it seems unending. Until she can’t do it anymore.
Under the direction of Jonathan Libman, Strauss does a splendid job of navigating romance, pain, desperation, and humor in the piece. (During the press performance I attended, however, Strauss broke character to ask a woman in the front row not to scribble notes; it was a stunning breach of theatrical protocol, but given the history he was pouring forth, it was understandable. He did his best to incorporate the episode as a joke later on and alleviate the writer’s discomfort.)
Ultimately, Strauss acquires the psilocybin mushrooms and returns to Martha’s Vineyard alone, in the winter, to try them out. (The playwright in him carefully indicates the passage of time.) The experiment skirts a near-disaster, and brings him a measure of relief. That’s surely why the actor/playwright is donating all profits from the show to the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). It is the nonprofit behind the study that caught his eye.
Adam Strauss’s The Mushroom Cure is playing at the Cherry Lane Theater (38 Commerce Street, three blocks south of Christopher Street) through August 13. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Matinees are Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets may be ordered by calling OvationTix at (866) 811-4111 or visiting themushroomcure.com.
Love has a hard road to travel to find itself, especially in this madcap world. It has never been easy for young adults to figure out the mating game, and in Half Moon Bay, a dark and witty new play by Dan Moyer, the lovers meet in the grungy bar of a bowling alley. The two-hander opens to Led Zeppelin and bright lights, then goes pitch-black as the Talking Heads blare in the darkness. The lights (by Mike Inwood) abruptly go full up to reveal Annie (Keilly McQuail) alone at the bar, where she meets the neurotic Gabe (Gabriel King), a gambling addict with too much time and money on his hands. The alcoholic Annie gives Gabe lessons on pickup lines. And so begins a dark comedy about the narcissistic, existentialist, and often self-destructive struggle young adults experience to find themselves.
Moyer’s intelligent yet poignant dialogue reflects what many go through at that period when a person realizes he or she is not a child anymore and is trying to play grownup, but doesn’t know how. Gabe asks, “You here with anyone else?” And Annie retorts smugly, “No I come here alone and bowl by myself, then I go home and cry when I lose.” Amid the humorous banter there is a serious undertone that mirrors the inner struggle of finding love in a hopeless place.
Annie realizes she’s an addict when she discovers she has genuine feelings for Gabe. Although both actors start out tensely over-animated in performance, as they live through what they are doing and build the emotional life of their characters, their desperation becomes compelling.
Reid Thompson’s set is so real it’s surreal, enhancing that unearthly feeling that alcohol and attraction can give. Pictures on the wall tell of past bowling championships; half-empty liquor bottles and dirty glasses whisper of other lost nights. The disarray of Annie’s apartment reflects the disarray of her life.
Choices by sound designer Janie Bullard and Thompson heighten the characters’ emotional state. The muted outside illumination that Inwood has artfully crafted for the Santa Cruz, Calif., setting is particularly effective, as is the way nighttime becomes daybreak as Annie switches from “party-ready” to “Get the hell out of here” mode after their evening together.
Thompson’s set is utilized fully by director Jess Chayes; the actors improvise and evolve in their experience together, and ultimately connect in this mad, mad world. Starting out quick-witted and terse, the evening ends poignantly still and emotionally moving. The play looks at broken children and reprimands society to offer more to them, underlining that young adults need guidance on how to love as well as maneuver through life.
In response to Annie’s story on bad pickup lines like “Your mouth is like a window to the tongue,” Gabe asks her, “It didn’t work, did it?” She sadly replies, “Of course it didn’t work. Very much.” Yet a good deal of the play is about what is not said; it helps that director Jess Chayes’s choice of music sets the proper tone.
Thankfully, Moyer offers hope in the end for the lovers. After much fear and reluctance Annie does open up and allows Gabe into her heart. There’s a possibility for them to find a true connection.
Lesser America’s production of Half Moon Bay runs through June 4 at the Cherry Lane Theatre (38 Commerce St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m.; there is an additional performance on Wednesday, May 18, at 8 p.m. For tickets, which are $19, call OvationTix at (866) 811-4111 or visit www.cherrylanetheatre.org/onstage/half-moon-bay.
