The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.
War Words, assembled by Michelle Kholos Brooks from the words of some dozen veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, is simplicity itself, and all the stronger for it. The show thrusts the audience into combat and its devastating aftereffects. You may quibble here and there with the presentation and the choices of what’s included and what isn’t, but it’s unlikely that you’ll leave A.R.T./New York unmoved.
Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.
