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.
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.
In the new drama Brooklyn Laundry, John Patrick Shanley—both author and director—is toying with the impact of uncanny coincidences on the narrative trajectory of his principal characters. That theme should ring a bell with fans of Moonstruck, the intoxicating 1987 film comedy for which this echt New York playwright won a best original screenplay Oscar.
By this point, the plays of Qui Nguyen are starting to look like “seen one, seen them all.” From his earliest productions, for downtown theater troupe Vampire Cowboys, Nguyen’s works have their hallmarks: comic-book-style scenic design, martial arts, superhero and pop-culture fandom. The playwright has often been acclaimed for inventive storytelling and stagecraft. But now that he’s deployed the same gimmicks in play after play, their novelty has worn off. In Poor Yella Rednecks, Nguyen’s latest show to debut in New York, they seem obtrusive. The play is solidly plotted, with thoughtful, moving dialogue scenes. It could shed all the whiz-bang surrealities and still be a worthwhile, entertaining dramedy.
Sports, friendship and Lebron James are central to Rajiv Joseph’s play King James. The renowned basketball player, known by the epithet of the title, brings two unlikely sports fanatics together to form a long-term bond that surpasses a ball game.
An hour into The Best We Could, you realize you’re not watching the play you thought you were. Emily Feldman’s new drama seemed like it was a semi-experimental staging of a cross-country drive during which a grown woman and her dad visit national parks and revisit moments in their lives. Then, all of a sudden, it’s about something very specific beyond the sightseeing, bonding and memories. And the play belongs to a particular category of stories—and that category is not road trips or family relationships or Our Town riffs.
Morning Sun by Simon Stephens is a multigenerational play about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Most of their story, both set in and serving as an homage to New York City, has been told before: mother-daughter conflicts, failed love affairs, and childhood friendships that don’t stand the test of time. Stephens has crafted fast-paced, staccato dialogue that moves effortlessly through decades to tell their story.
Donald Margulies’s new play, Long Lost, almost revels in overly familiar plot elements. Focusing on two brothers who haven’t seen each other in years, Margulies draws on the good brother/bad brother dynamic of the Cain and Abel story; it pops up in Hollywood films as different as Arsenic and Old Lace and Legends of the Fall, but perhaps most pertinently in Duel in the Sun, where the brothers form two points of a love triangle. Here the siblings are David (Kelly AuCoin), a successful consultant, and his older brother, Billy (a gray-bearded Lee Tergesen). In Margulies’s story. David’s wife Molly (Annie Parisse) glancingly forms the third point. But another oft-mined trope is also at play: the stranger who arrives in a settled household and disrupts it is a staple of drama from The Playboy of the Western World to Picnic.
