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.
The main character in Rachel Bonds’ new drama Jonah is not Jonah but Ana, a young woman portrayed from age 16 into her 30s by Gabby Beans, who’s on stage for the entire play. Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) is in only the first third, except for a brief reappearance near the end. The play peaks during those early scenes, which are charming and funny, then gets increasingly talky and disturbing in the post-Jonah scenes.
Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.
When Katie Holmes made her New York stage debut in 2008, she was married to Tom Cruise, and paparazzi descended on Broadway for her run in the All My Sons revival. Coincidentally, one of the first things Holmes says in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is “I can’t go anywhere in public without a hassle.” Holmes portrays a beautiful, famous actress, which sounds like a good fit for her. The role is a bad fit for the play itself, however, as it does not cohere with the other story lines.
Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick is a surrealist, allegorical play about illness, loss, and human connection. The primary setting is The Big City, in something resembling modernity before cellular phones, though this is also a primeval, mythic world, where giant birds are liable to snatch you up (best to buy “certified bird insurance,” just in case). The characters are blasé about such events, but there’s also an awareness that something isn’t quite right: the play’s unseen narrator notes that “a bird caws outside your window / it’s too tremendous, too prehistoric / too loud for a city this big.”
Greasy fast food certainly takes its toll on the health of Americans, but it’s not usually so direct as death by Fry-O-Later. Such is the grisly fate of Duncan, at the hands of Mac and Pat McBeth, in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Scotland, PA, a musical adaptation of Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, which was a dark-comic send-up of 1970s Middle America using the plot of Macbeth in a fast-food setting.
Jodi (Idina Menzel), the fortysomething central character in Joshua Harmon’s attention-grabbing new drama, Skintight, is having a bad time. She has arrived unannounced at her father’s Greenwich Village townhouse to help celebrate his 70th birthday, even though she has been warned not to by her dad. But she’s determined to connect with those who love her in her time of trial: in Los Angeles she has just attended the wedding of her ex-husband to a perky young 25-year-old.
