The Clubbed Thumb theater company follows up last year’s excellent Grief Hotel with another gem that originated in its Summerworks program, Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound, in which a group of islanders in the Pacific Northwest mourn the disappearance of a nearby pod of orca whales. The production, in residency at the Public Theater, is astonishing: Koogler’s play is both strange and naturalistic, as funny as it is deeply moving, even shattering; Arin Arbus’s note-perfect direction is mesmerizing, smartly enhancing the emotional climaxes but never overdoing them; and the ensemble of nine is simply extraordinary.
Matthew Lombardo wrangles comedy out of a story that is often not comical—wisecracks can be hard to resist coming from a wisecracking pro like Caroline Aaron—but both the humor and pathos in his new play Conversations with Mother are calculated and shallow.
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”
The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
One-act plays are rarely staged in New York—with the exception of a recent Irish Rep bill of Beckett shorts—so Urban Stages deserves credit for undertaking two new ones, each about 50 minutes long. The plays are the result of a competition for one-acts with two characters, under the umbrella title Dynamic Duos; the two winners were chosen from about 300 submissions.
