Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.
Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
In the 1950s Paddy Chayefsky wrote a successful drama, Middle of the Night, in which nobody could understand what a young Gena Rowlands could see in an old Edward G. Robinson. Or, in the movie version, what Kim Novak could see in Fredric March. That quandary is back, after a fashion, with Mr. Parker, Michael McKeever’s sort-of-new drama (it premiered in Florida in 2018). Only this time it’s hard to see what Davi Santos sees in Derek Smith.
The Red Bull Theater, founded in 2003 to focus on Jacobean drama (those English playwrights who were overshadowed by Shakespeare) has in recent seasons been incorporating non-Jacobean plays into its offerings, so it’s a pleasure to see the company back on home ground with John Webster’s potboiler The White Devil. Webster is best known for The Duchess of Malfi, perhaps the greatest non-Shakespearean play of the period; The White Devil’s complex plot is inspired by the same Italian family.
The Gingold Group in New York thrives on the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Each month, artistic director David Staller assembles a cast for readings of them, but far too seldom is a Shaw work fully staged in New York. As Staller’s production of Heartbreak House shows, Shaw is still timely, almost uncannily so. Set during World War I, the play is an examination of the British nation; its characters encompass rich and poor, young and old, gentry and businessmen and clergy. In the view of the shrewd old socialist, it is, in the words of heroine Ellie Dunn, a “house without foundation—I call it Heartbreak House.”
