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.
When Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac opened in 1897, it was hailed not only for its poetry but for its elaborate sets—one for each of the five acts, from bakery to battlefield—and for its poetry and grandiose passions. Martin Crimp’s version of the story of unrequited love, produced and directed by Jamie Lloyd at BAM, has only the faintest glimmers of any exaltation. More often it’s simply disappointing.
The New Group playbill says Cyrano is “adapted by Erica Schmidt from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.” Schmidt is a distinguished mid-career stage director and author of All the Fine Boys, a gritty, unsettling 2017 drama which, like Cyrano, was given its New York City premiere by The New Group. As “adaptor,” Schmidt has dismantled Rostand’s 1897 masterpiece, reassembling a few of its elements as a streamlined libretto with a prevailing tone of melancholy.
