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.
Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.
It’s a fallacy that addiction can be cured by a stint in rehab. Anyone celebrating sobriety can affirm that the process of recovery takes decades—and is often lifelong. Nevertheless, a rehab experience can trigger a life-changing awakening. This unpredictable process is at the center of Spike Manton and Harry Teinowtiz’s Another Shot, a poignant exploration of Teinowitz’s alcoholism and treatment. Director Jackson Gay keeps the play teetering between denial and acceptance, and between comedy and tragedy.
Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.
“Do you all eat grapes?” James Hindman asks, proffering a bowl of green grapes at the outset of his one-man show, What Doesn’t Kill You, directed by Suzanne Barabas, artistic director of the New Jersey Repertory Company, where this show began its theatrical life. And while Hindman perhaps doesn’t want anyone to leap to their feet and grab a grape, this kind of seemingly non-rhetorical question is part of the audience intimacy he develops throughout the piece (and indeed some audience members did call out at various prompts, though no one took a grape). Hindman’s friendly, casual style establishes rapport, and once everyone is comfortable, he becomes a tour guide on his personal journey into and out of a New Jersey hospital, after suffering the kind of heart attack that one nurse refers to as the “widow maker.”
David Finnigan’s performance piece on the climate crisis, Deep History, now playing at the Public Theater after stops elsewhere, including the Edinburgh Fringe, will inevitably be compared to a TED talk: Finnigan is scientifically fluent and uses images from his laptop (video design by Hayley Egan) to craft a deeply informed narrative of climate and human history, with some autobiography and whimsy mixed in. TED talks can be engaging, of course, and Finnigan is certainly that; but this description also sells Finnigan short. There is theatricality at work in the 65-minute piece, directed by Annette Mees, particularly a twist in the storytelling that revolves around the gap between 2019 (when the piece was written) and the time when it is performed.
Tina Packer’s Women of Will is meant to be an educational performance piece that explores Shakespeare’s trajectory as a writer through the lens of his female characters, diving into issues of gender and power. The piece has had various productions over the years and was published as a book in 2015 (subtitled Understanding Shakespeare’s Female Characters). Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, who has directed the show before, now directs what he has referred to as Women of Will 2.0, for a limited engagement at the West End Theatre.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
Director David Cromer has the ability to conjure expansive worlds from small, banal settings: For Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter, the set (designed with remarkable detail by Walt Spangler) occupies only a part of the space available on the stage of Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. As he did with A Case for the Existence of God at Signature Theatre, Cromer encloses the characters in order to open them up. Of course, in order to perform this low-key magic, there must be sharply drawn, deeply human characters to work with.
It’s no surprise that the Trump era and its aftermath have been a boon to documentary plays. These plays don’t all address explicitly political topics, and they vary widely from one another in tone, method, and approach; but hovering over this era’s documentary plays is the relentless assault being waged on the idea of truth, on the very nature of reality itself, and the uncertainty over whether our society and institutions will persevere.
Meet your new mother-in-law, Beiv (Kate Mulgrew): she’s Ireland’s “great feminist artist” who lives on a remote island off the coast of West Cork, has an acerbic wit and an imperious manner, a penchant for knocking down the walls of her house, a strained relationship with her son, and may have murdered her husband. Oh, and she didn’t know her son was married until you showed up with him from San Francisco. This is the situation that 23-year-old Bonnie (Ayana Workman) finds herself in at the outset of Nancy Harris’s overstuffed mystery The Beacon, which was commissioned by Druid Theatre Company and now arrives at the Irish Rep after a 2019 run at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
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.
An underlying anxiety is on display in Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal about the appeal of his absurdist play: exhibit A is a character listed as Audience Member in the program (Stephanie Berry), who interrupts the proceedings about 30 minutes into the show to offer a detailed explanation of why she is not pleased:
Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there? I’d happily watch a play about that—if it was different.
Take a stand! Inspire action! Touch our hearts—or at least you should try!
We’ve given this gift to you of our evening—one of our precious few nights on this earth—and you’re showing us this?????
At the outset of Ife Olujobi’s Jordans, a surreal comic-horror satire of racial capitalism and its effects on Black bodies, Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), a Black receptionist at a fashionable event space/production facility, essentially builds the stylish, gleaming set (designed by Matt Saunders). This activity is one of many moments in director Whitney White’s sleek production when Jordan’s unceasing labor in the face of disregard or outright hostility from her all-white co-workers is highlighted. Later, when Jordan’s colleague Emma (Brontë England-Nelson) says in a presentation to their wicked boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), that the women at the firm are “slaving away,” she explicitly does not include Jordan in her statement.
Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel was part of Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks program, and now comes to the Public Theater for a more extended engagement. This is great news, because the play very much deserves a longer look and wider audience. It is presented in partnership with New Georges, who produce “weird, weird-ish, and often impossible plays”; Grief Hotel is weird—gloriously so—but it’s not impossible. In fact, the strength of the play lies in Birkenmeier’s canny creation of an offbeat yet accessible style, thanks to her sharp ear for dialogue that is fundamentally naturalistic and works in productive combination with the play’s slightly surreal, collage-like structure, directed with bracing clarity by Tara Ahmadinejad.
Lucy Prebble’s The Effect was first staged in 2012, presented at Barrow Street Theatre in the Village in 2016, and then revived at London’s National Theatre in 2023. That revival now comes to the Shed. It is a psychopharmacological love story: Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie (Taylor Russell) are participants in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant, overseen by Dr. Lorna James (Michele Austin). Tristan is an extroverted working-class Londoner from Hackney with a mix of confidence and self-deprecation, while Connie is a more tightly wound, introverted psychology student whose participation in the study is apparently less about getting paid than about intellectual interest.
Sunset Baby begins with Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), a legend of the Black Liberation Movement who has spent time in prison for robbing an armored truck, speaking hesitantly into a camcorder—the video feed is projected above the stage—about the uncertainties of fatherhood: “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable.” Just how complicated it is in his particular case is soon revealed when he tries to reunite with his estranged daughter, Nina (Moses Ingram), a woman who has built a hard, protective shell around herself and does not want to hear a whiff of nostalgia from a man she barely knows. She doesn’t even want Kenyatta to say her name: “Do not say my name as if you’ve said it a hundred times. As if we have this familiarity between us. We are not familiar. We are not close.”
A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.
Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm at the Vineyard Theatre is a nightmare version of an office sitcom, set during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Quirky worker bees perform evil tasks while navigating interpersonal relationships and an ever-present authoritarian state looming over them, in the form of Vladimir Putin’s portrait on the wall and an armed soldier keeping watch. The professional Internet trolls in St. Petersburg, at the benignly named Internet Research Agency, send out vast numbers of tweets and posts using fake accounts—a “mix of celebrities, eggs, fake individuals, and pundits”—to disseminate misinformation. In almost every case, Gancher uses real Russian troll tweets, a documentary reality that makes the set-up even more nightmarish.
The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.
Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is often described as “Chekhovian,” and, indeed, the parallels to The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are unmistakable: three very different sisters of the O’Donnell family, along with their relations and hangers-on, navigate a collapsing estate, literally and figuratively, and grapple with a questionable family legacy and sense of purpose. Aristocrats is the second installment of the Irish Rep’s Friel Project, following an exquisite production of Translations.
A specter is haunting Rachel Bloom—the specter of death. In fact, Death is sitting in the fifth row of her show, Death, Let Me Do My Show, looking suspiciously like Bloom’s friend David Hull, the “moderately successful actor who seems stuck between leading man and character roles” (as she describes him). And Death insists on being acknowledged, contrary to Bloom’s plan to deliver the show as she conceived it in 2019.
Unconfined is a solo theater piece based on real-life events that asks a fundamental question: What does it mean to really know another person? In this case, the question is more difficult than usual, as the person to get to know is on lockdown on death row. The story of a seemingly kind, thoughtful, creative, and spiritually sophisticated convicted murderer came to playwright Liz Richardson’s attention when she “received a binder of extraordinary poems, drawings, and letters by a prisoner who had been on death row for 18 years,” as noted in the program. She wrote the piece based on her own research and interviews. Richardson portrays three characters who all interacted with the unseen, unnamed protagonist while he was imprisoned: Barbara, a professor of comparative religion at a Southern university; Eleanor, an English artist; and a fellow death-row inmate, Benny.
