Cherry Lane Theatre

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This Beautiful Future

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This Beautiful Future

A woman walks over to a large flat-screen TV and, using the remote control, selects a karaoke track. Believe it or not, this is the start of a play set in occupied France in 1944: This Beautiful Future, directed by Jack Serio. That woman and her male counterpart—theater vets Angelina Fiordellisi and Austin Pendleton as characters named Angelina and Austin—are on stage for the entire 80-minute running time, but the story really centers on two teenagers: Otto, a German soldier stationed in Chartres in the summer of ’44, and Elodie, a local girl. They’re both painfully naive. She thinks her Jewish neighbors will eventually come home; he’s psyched to march into England and anticipates a quick British surrender.

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Fear

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Fear

Matt Williams’s Fear, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, begins with Phil (Enrico Colantoni) dragging 15-year-old Jamie (Alexander Garfin) on stage in a stranglehold. “Why were you at the lake?” Phil demands, in the abandoned tool shed where he takes his prisoner (scenic design by Andrew Boyce). At its best, Fear, soundly directed by Tea Alagić, is propelled by mystery and frayed nerves, with the potential for violence looming. The confrontation is not just between Phil and Jamie, but soon Ethan (Obi Abili) stumbles upon the unusual scene—with Jamie now tied to a chair—and the story of a missing girl in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood becomes about class and cultural conflict.

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American Moor

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American Moor

Keith Hamilton Cobb has written a thrilling part for himself in American Moor, a powerful look at Shakespeare, Othello, and the plight of black actors trying to pursue their craft with honesty. Cobb himself stars, although his character in the script is called the Actor. The play arrives at a moment when race and white privilege dominate the zeitgeist. Some of the material is familiar, but much is unique and insightful.

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Actually, We’re F**ked

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Actually, We’re F**ked

Playwright Matt Williams created the TV series Roseanne, co-created the TV series Home Improvement, and was a writer on The Cosby Show, which is to say that the man knows a little something about domestic comedies in which hard-working parents love and nurture their large families. In his new play, Actually, We’re F**ked, he attempts to go in a different direction, exploring whether two young couples who are barely holding their marriages together can stop fretting, navel-gazing, and betraying each other long enough to have, or even want, a ch**d. 

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Final Follies

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Final Follies

If you thought you knew A.R. Gurney, you’re in for a bit of a surprise. Final Follies, Primary Stages’ collection of three Gurney one-acts, reveals facets of the late, beloved playwright that steer clear of the collective impression of him. Yes, WASPs frequent the stage, though not exclusively, and Gurney is concerned as usual with questions of status, repression, and traditions passed on from generation to generation. But he wanders into what seems very un-Gurney territory—with uneven but often beguiling results. 

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In a Word

In a Word

Words are constantly shifting and changing meaning, and common phrases take on new personas in the world of Lauren Yee’s In a Word. Yee’s play tells the story of Fiona (Laura Ramadei), whose 7-year-old, emotionally disturbed son, Tristan, has been missing for two years. She has no information on his whereabouts, and she sorts through her memories endlessly to find any clue she can about why he disappeared. As Fiona flashes back to past experiences, Yee asks the audience to let go and come along for the ride.

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The Traveling Lady

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The Traveling Lady

Texas native Horton Foote was a contemporary of Tennessee Williams, though he outlived the Mississippi-born playwright by more than a quarter century. In a long career, Foote—like Williams—channeled voices of small-town eccentrics in dramas depicting the region where he spent his formative years. Five such eccentrics, embodied by top-flight character actors giving memorable supporting performances, rescue the otherwise anodyne revival of Foote’s The Traveling Lady, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and La Femme Theatre Productions, and make it worth an evening’s time.

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