One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”
The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
Of all the productions opening Off-Broadway this season, B*tchcraft may well be the most bewitching. With music and lyrics written by Bitch, and book by her and Margie Zohn, who also directs, it’s a wild journey into how Bitch, a quiet girl from suburban Michigan, shed her chrysalis to become the queer icon that she is today.
Night Sings Its Songs is a rare opportunity to see a play by Jon Fosse, the Norwegian winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fosse’s 1997 play is centered on a married couple, named only Young Man and Young Woman. From the outset it’s clear they are having marital difficulties. Young Man (Kyle Cameron) is unhappy and apathetic, while Young Woman is dissatisfied in her marriage and feeling stuck. They have a baby who periodically cries.
With My Man Kono, now premiering at Pan Asian Repertory, playwright Philip W. Chung has an interesting story to tell. He tells it dutifully, thoroughly, and for the most part clearly. But not excitingly. Chung has done his research. His title character, Toraichi Kono (Brian Lee Huynh), was a Japanese immigrant who made it to the United States in the early 20th century and rose to a position of relative wealth and importance, then saw his fortunes dramatically reverse.
Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.
Richard Chang mixes history and fiction in Citizen Wong to tell the story of Wong Chin Foo, the nineteenth-century Chinese-American journalist, activist, performer, and lecturer who fought for equal rights for Chinese-Americans and to dispel pernicious, racist stereotypes about Chinese people and culture. Presented by Pan Asian Repertory, Citizen Wong is co-directed by Ernest Abuba and Chongren Fan and features a cast of six, with the actors playing multiple characters, including historical personages or those inspired by such. The work is ambitious and timely, explicitly drawing connections to the present-day rise in anti-Asian bigotry.
Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.
