Peter Danish’s Last Call is a fairy tale with heroes, villains, operatic emotions, and a countertenor. It’s a three-actor play set in the magical kingdom of classical music during the era of two potentates, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who reigned supreme in concert halls and recording studios around the world for much of the 20th century.
A one-man Uncle Vanya could easily have come off as a stunt. How do you turn an Anton Chekhov staple, one that has visited New York stages multiple times in the past few seasons alone, into a solo show, and an utterly new experience? But Vanya turns out to be good theater and, more surprisingly, very good Chekhov.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in his opening line of Anna Karenina, and Joshua Harmon shows that every unhappy family member is unhappy in her own way in We Had a World, his stirring new play that gets at universal truths through a very personal story.
For all the theater community’s opposition to Donald Trump, there have been relatively few stage works taking on Trumpism. Amerikin, by Chisa Hutchinson, looks like it could be one during its first half, with its portrayal of “just your white supremacists next door,” but the story heads in a different direction when new characters and themes are introduced in Act II. Though her first act is definitely stronger, Hutchinson overall has crafted an absorbing look at life in these United States.
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has one of drama’s greatest female roles—Blanche DuBois, perhaps only rivaled by Shaw’s St. Joan and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s a theatrical mountain that any serious actress would like to scale, and Patsy Ferran deserves credit for doing so, even if the Almeida Theatre production visiting BAM from London comes up short. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar also features the better-known Paul Mescal (of Gladiator II renown) as Stanley Kowalski.
More than 40 years have passed since Brian Friel’s Translations premiered, but Doug Hughes’s haunting new production shows that this play remains relevant as it explores the darker issues surrounding Anglo-Irish relations and the profound problem of language.
