The title of Erika Sheffer’s new play refers to the most famous Vladimir in the world at the moment—Russia’s president. Unlike Peter Morgan’s recent Patriots, however, Valdimir Putin doesn’t appear in Sheffer’s ambitious drama, although he casts a long shadow over the characters. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the play, with its foreign setting and journalistic protagonists, shares a kinship with David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda (1985)—it’s a worthy cousin to that work.
Neither the script nor the program for People of the Book states when the play takes place, so presumably it is the present. That makes Yussef El Guindi's drama not only morally and logically confused but dated as well. It treats the fight against the Iraqi insurgency, a U.S. military action that ceased about a decade ago, as a current event.
David Finnigan’s performance piece on the climate crisis, Deep History, now playing at the Public Theater after stops elsewhere, including the Edinburgh Fringe, will inevitably be compared to a TED talk: Finnigan is scientifically fluent and uses images from his laptop (video design by Hayley Egan) to craft a deeply informed narrative of climate and human history, with some autobiography and whimsy mixed in. TED talks can be engaging, of course, and Finnigan is certainly that; but this description also sells Finnigan short. There is theatricality at work in the 65-minute piece, directed by Annette Mees, particularly a twist in the storytelling that revolves around the gap between 2019 (when the piece was written) and the time when it is performed.
Tina Packer’s Women of Will is meant to be an educational performance piece that explores Shakespeare’s trajectory as a writer through the lens of his female characters, diving into issues of gender and power. The piece has had various productions over the years and was published as a book in 2015 (subtitled Understanding Shakespeare’s Female Characters). Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, who has directed the show before, now directs what he has referred to as Women of Will 2.0, for a limited engagement at the West End Theatre.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
Novenas for a Lost Hospital is a memory play told through several narrators that celebrates St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic charitable hospital in the West Village that was founded in 1849 and closed in 2010. The novenas (devotional prayers in Catholicism), of which there are nine, give structure to the elegant sections that move back and forth in time from the founding to the closing. The effect is part drama, part history lesson, and part activism/immersive theater.
Poor J.M. Barrie hasn’t had an easy time of it in the 21st century, with the notable exception of revivals of one-acts at the Mint Theater. The 2015 musical Finding Neverland, based on a film, focused on the dramatist’s struggle to find success after failure and the triumphant creation of Peter Pan, his classic 1904 play about the boy who won’t grow up—a play that, by the way, most of Finding Neverland’s audience had probably never seen, since nobody actually stages it. It’s known primarily through the musicalized version from the 1950s that starred Mary Martin, although the Royal National Theatre’s 1997 production, with Peter played by Daniel Evans, now artistic director of the Chichester Festival, and Ian McKellen as Captain Hook, showed the original is still a viable and glorious work.
