Ryan Spahn

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Inspired by True Events

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Inspired by True Events

Ryan Spahn’s Inspired by True Events is an amalgamation of docudrama, backstage comedy, psychological thriller, and immersive theater. The boundaries between the genres often blur, and the effect is often comical, sometimes chilling, and occasionally disorienting. The production’s fun-house quality is encapsulated in the paradoxical and droll preshow announcement: “The following story you’re about to witness is inspired by true events. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”

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Merry Me

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Merry Me

Hansol Jung’s irreverent new comedy Merry Me is a dramaturgical mash-up that borrows freely from Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Along the way it also includes allusions to (naming just a few) poems by Sappho, Fifty Shades of Grey, and The L Word. The conceit is clever and ambitious, but the elements rarely cohere. To the credit of a hardworking and resourceful cast, though, there are some funny moments, but much of the merriment seems forced rather than breezily effortless.

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Jane Anger

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Jane Anger

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.

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Mr. Toole

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Mr. Toole

The title character in Vivian Neuwirth’s Mr. Toole is John Kennedy Toole, author of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Known as “Ken” to family and friends, Toole died in 1969, more than a decade before his book was published. Neuwirth knew Toole when she was a student at St. Mary’s Dominican High School in New Orleans, where he taught English. “He was,” she says, “an amazing teacher” with a “theatrical flair.”

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Summer and Smoke

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Summer and Smoke

Classic Stage Company and Transport Group are taking a fresh look at Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Critical estimation of this lyrical drama—the playwright's fourth Broadway outing—has fluctuated since its 1948 premiere. After the original New York presentation, Summer and Smoke seemed destined for obscurity. But Jose Quintero’s 1952 production for Circle in the Square was a triumph and, according to many commentators, marked the birth of Off-Broadway. The current revival, under sure-handed direction by Jack Cummings III, discards the realistic trappings of mid-20th-century American theater and features a nearly ideal cast.

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Daniel’s Husband

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Daniel’s Husband

Daniel’s Husband is one of those plays where, halfway through, something so unexpected, plot-altering, and tone-shifting happens that it just can’t be revealed. Michael McKeever’s comedy-drama about the still-new era of gay marriage is cleft in two—part one: comedy, part two: drama—and both halves are effective, if you’re willing to accept some questionable behavior on the part of the title character.

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