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.
In the 1990s, Rajiv Joseph spent three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Dakar 2000, currently at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), draws on the playwright’s memories of that experience and his understanding of East Africa at the advent of the new millennium.
Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight is one of those “ship of fools” dramas that throw together unacquainted travelers on a common carrier. The title comes from a real passenger-train service running daily from Los Angeles to Seattle. Amtrak’s website promises potential Coast Starlight customers a “grand West Coast train adventure … pass[ing] through Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Portland.” For Bunin’s characters, however, the reality is not so much an adventure as an anxious long-haul.
