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.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
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.
Part ghost story, part coming-of-age drama, part memory play, Being Chaka—written by Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi and Nalini Sharma—is a provocative investigation into racism in America. The surreal plot centers on the character Chaka (Kahiem Rivera), a black 16-year-old transfer student at East Prep High School in Manhattan. As the action unfolds, the audience will see him continually shifting between reality and dreamscapes, with the line between the two worlds often blurring.
Echoing through the halls and into the New Ohio Theatre’s performance space is My Onliness, a daring new experimental work co-produced by the collective One-Eighth Theater, the New Ohio Theatre, and IRT Theater. Written by New Ohio’s artistic director, Robert Lyons, My Onliness takes elements inspired by Polish dramatist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and transforms them into what One-Eighth declares as the New Absurd. And wonderfully absurd it is.
If you’re sentimental about past-their-prime forms of transit, and if you can look past the infelicity that is Amtrak, it’s easy to fall in love with trains. They occupy so many iconic moments in American literature and film, and there are so many songs about them. It’s enough to send you into Songs About Trains, a new musical revue, waxing nostalgic. Then note the subtitle: A Celebration of Labor Through Folk Music. If you’re fond of Woody Guthrie and his ilk and tales of Casey Jones and John Henry, well, the show’s already halfway down the track. But Songs About Trains turns out to be even richer than that. It’s not just songs about trains: It can be seen as the whole damn history of American expansion.
Poking fun at Shakespeare has been a fruitful pastime for more than a century. George Bernard Shaw enjoyed taking the Bard down a peg in his reviews of Victorian productions. In the 1950s Richard Armour wrote cheeky synopses of the plays in Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, and in 2015 the Broadway musical Something Rotten made fun of Shakespeare himself. Now actress and playwright Talene Monahon has done her bit to twist the dagger a few more times into the playwright with an often funny and splendidly acted Jane Anger.
