Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
Charles Busch has frequently used old films as fodder for his comedies: Red Scare on Sunset, Shanghai Moon, and The Lady in Question all draw on silver-screen melodrama for a knowing send-up of Hollywood tropes. But his latest play, Ibsen’s Ghost, is a marked change. Busch has steeped himself in the life of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and fashioned both facts and fiction into a charming and funny Improbable Biographical Fantasy, as he calls it.
It’s been quite a while since Charles Busch, the playwright and performer who specializes in sending up old movie tropes in works like The Divine Sister and Red Scare on Sunset, has had a show that he deemed ready for review, so The Confession of Lily Dare counts as a successful return to form. It’s a loopy satire of film melodramas about fallen women, although its most prominent forbear is Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first performed in 1902). Few performers can discern Hollywood camp as well as Busch: he has even provided commentary on DVD releases of The Bad Seed and Dead Ringer.
