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.
Eliana Pipes’ Bite Me—a 90-minute drama having its world premiere in a coproduction by WP Theater and Colt Coeur—has an ABC Afterschool Special vibe. It’s about high schoolers in distress, but is not harsh and graphic like much of today's teen fare; its gentleness is more in line with the ’70s-era standards of those Afterschool Specials, minus the sappiness and didacticism.
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.
