Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and performance-artist Taylor Mac, both recipients of MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” and past finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are currently at the Signature Theatre for a revival of Ruhl’s 1998 adaptation of Orlando, the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf. Mac, who’s playing the title role, is renowned as a dramatist but, on this occasion, serves strictly as an actor.
“Power corrupts” is a global, historical truism, possibly even more so when conquerors ensnare the vanquished to do their dirty work. Such was the case for Jews in the mid–20th century in Europe’s Nazi-controlled ghettoes. The Nazis often appointed Jewish leaders to decide on the people to be deported—often a death sentence. The Jewish-run panels were called Judenrats. In Leslie Epstein’s King of the Jews, adapted from his novel of the same name, an ethnic German Nazi enforcer in Łódź, Poland, authorizes a group of Jews to select fellow Jews for deportation.
