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.
A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.
Jen Silverman’s Spain is inspired by a kernel of historical fact—just a kernel. It concerns a documentary, The Spanish Earth, calculated to rouse sympathy in the United States for Spain’s Second Republic in the long civil war against General Francisco Franco’s fascist insurgency. There was (or, rather, is) such a documentary, produced by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and American editor/producer Helen Van Dongen, released in 1937. A number of noteworthy American intellectuals worked on the film, including novelists Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, playwright Lillian Hellman, actor Orson Welles, poet Archibald MacLeish, and composer Virgil Thomson. In stage directions, Silverman writes that Spain is not “a history play in the most conventional meaning.” It’s “set in 1936 in the West Village,” she says, then adds, “Sort of.” This 90-minute comedy-drama is an absurdist-tinged fantasy that seizes a moment of history and bends it to the breaking point.
Superheroes haven’t had an easy time of it in musicals. It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman opened in 1966 to critical praise but public indifference, and then there was that little show about Spider-Man some seasons back. Add to this unlucky list Superhero at Second Stage, which at least invents its own superheroes rather than sullying the reputations of beloved ones. Further, it’s beautifully produced, assembled by experienced hands (book, John Logan; music and lyrics, Tom Kitt), and possessing several good songs. The trouble is, Superhero isn’t so much written as programmed.
Steven Levenson’s fast-paced and hilarious play, Days of Rage, opens in October 1969. America is riven. The war in Vietnam has taken more than 30,000 American lives. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy have been assassinated. Twenty thousand mostly young people turned out to protest the war in Vietnam at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and police are assigned to contain and control the crowd at all costs. Eight of the protesters, later known as the Chicago Eight, were put on trial in late August 1969. Word goes out to bus protesters to the trial. Both the protesters and the Chicago Eight see the case as a way to put the nation itself, its racism and unjust war, on trial. Levenson’s powerful play focuses a sharp gaze at politics and the hidden volatility that can tip over into violence and the spilling of blood.
“Levenson writes with great clarity about the fundamental unclarity of the human situation. Several times Jenny talks in startling detail about the effects of napalm and the Vietnamese children it has killed. It is the spring of her idealism and of her willingness to resort to violence. Hal has no satisfying response to her.”
The play, adventurously directed by Trip Cullman, opens with a crash of music and blaring lights that subside quickly, leaving the audience facing the interior of a house: a living room below and bedroom above. It is in this house that the intimate political and personal saga of “the collective” unfolds. Spence, Jenny and Quinn (Mike Fest, Lauren Patten, and Odessa Young, respectively) have quit school to join the movement and, with two more of their friends, created “the collective.” The loud period music of Darron West’s brilliant sound design punctuates the short scenes capturing the heady mix of weed, idealism, radical politics and youth that fills the house.
For those old enough to remember, the mix is pitch-perfect. These are days of free love, of radical politics, of revolution, and of rejecting parents, school, and, most passionately of all, the war in Vietnam. Spence has a volume of Lenin that he reads. As members of the collective, the three share all decisions (money) and responsibilities (dishes). Even their bodies are on a rotating schedule: “We share everything,” Spence explains to Peggy. “Why should our bodies be any different?"
The timing and ensemble work of the actors is flawless. Spence, Jenny and Quinn spend their days fruitlessly trying to sign people up for free rides to Chicago for the protest. The story takes off with two events. Hal (J. Alphonse Nicholson), whose brother is fighting in Vietnam, is a gentle black man who works for a living and whose quiet attention stirs Jenny into life and into a reevaluation of that life as a romance buds. How will Hal’s presence in Jenny’s life play out in a collective in which everything is shared?
Lauren Patten (left) is Jenny and J. Alphonse Nicholson is Hal in Steve Levenson’s Days of Rage. Top: Tavi Gevinson (left) plays outsider Peggy, and Odessa Young is Quinn. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
At the same time, a wacky outsider, Peggy (Tavi Gevinson), desperate for a place to crash even with $2,000 in her pocket, swears allegiance to the Revolution and worms her way into the group. It is Peggy who first insists she is being followed by the FBI. It is Peggy who will try to get the collective to expel Jenny, and it is she who will supply Spence with a gun, egg him on to use it, and push the collective over the edge. This is the edge that Levenson sets out to explore, the cocktail that will or will not explode into violence.
Levenson writes with great clarity about the fundamental unclarity of the human situation. Several times Jenny talks in startling detail about the effects of napalm and the Vietnamese children it has killed. It is the spring of her idealism and of her willingness to resort to violence. Hal has no satisfying response to her. Are there times in which violence makes sense? But shattering news arrives: two friends have accidentally blown themselves up in an attempt to bomb a Detroit bank as an act of political protest. Hal points out that innocent workers in the bank, whose only “crime” is that they were trying to make a living, would have been killed if they had succeeded. It is now Jenny and her friends who are silent. Clearly, this violent protest cannot be the answer, either.
There is a second instance in which a bomb fails to explode—in a story Jenny shares with Hal. They are spooky moments, in which life appears to be imitating art since this play was already in previews when the country was startled by pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats which have also not exploded. The year 1969 is a window into our fraught times, and Levenson uses it just as Arthur Miller used the Salem witch trials to focus his unsparing gaze on the McCarthy years in The Crucible.
Days of Rage is playing through Nov. 25 at the 2nd Stage (305 West 43rd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday–Thursday and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday. Tickets from $40. For tickets and information, call (212) 246-4422 or visit 2st.com.
Signs of the decline and fall of the American Empire are everywhere visible, but perhaps nowhere more than in the Rust Belt, which has decay and depression hammered right into its nickname. Detroit may be its most potent symbol, but this ribbon, stretching from New York to Wisconsin, is peppered with towns both large and small that have never quite recovered from the trauma of deindustrialization.
Bee, the heroine of Bruce Norris’s new play, A Parallelogram, is in the midst of a bout of depression. She sits on her bed playing solitaire. Perhaps it’s because she and her boyfriend, Jay, have recently returned from a vacation on a tropical island, where she saw grinding poverty. Or perhaps because, on returning from their trip, she found that the pet parrot she had for 17 years had died from her own negligence (its empty cage sits in the bedroom). Perhaps it’s the hysterectomy that she recently had. Or could it possibly be because her future self, Bee 2, has materialized to reveal the future to her in all its futility?
Leaving no explorer-themed cliché unturned, Ernest Shackleton Loves Me boldly goes where many, many musicals have gone before, weaving a story of ersatz empowerment out of artistic crisis. The show, which encumbers a pair of insanely talented performers with thankless roles at the center of a human cartoon, patronizes and demeans its audience in its eagerness to be idiosyncratic.
Midlife crisis looms large in The Man from Nebraska, a 2003 play by Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy Letts (August: Osage County). In a series of swift, short scenes, barely punctuated by dialogue, or rather weighted down by silence, Letts delineates the life of the title character, the retired Ken Carpenter—a terrific Reed Birney. His retirement is spent eating at Outback Steakhouse with his wife, Nancy (Annette O’Toole, in an unshowy part rife with anguish and bewilderment), attending church together, and visiting his mother, Cammie, in a nursing home, where she suffers from either dementia or Alzheimer’s. They also see their daughter, Ashley, who lives nearby, although his granddaughter, Natalie, lives farther away.
In 2005, Griffin Matthews made the nearly 7,000-mile journey from the skyscrapers of New York City to the hills of Uganda to become one of the many American volunteers looking to “find themselves” and “change the world” by building schools in Africa. Now, Matthews stars in a musical about his journey and in doing so, brings the lives of those in Uganda to a New York City stage. Sound a little cliché? Perhaps it is, but Invisible Thread is a feel-good story brought to life by a clever script, catchy score, uplifting message and talented cast.
Co-written by Griffin Matthews and real-life partner/composer Matt Gould, Invisible Thread began as a piece titled Witness Uganda which won the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater in 2014. Griffin was a struggling actor booted from his church’s choir for being gay when he made the decision to leave his boyfriend Ryan (Corey Mach) behind to sign on as a volunteer. Instead of simply extolling this decision, Invisible Thread calls into question the reason that people perform altruistic deeds in the first place. Is it to help others or to help ourselves feel good? And does the motivation really matter if there is good coming from it?
Through self-deprecating humor and witty lines, both Ryan and Griffin acknowledge their somewhat stereotypical problems. “Imagine, a gay in the tenor section!” Upon arriving in Uganda at the compound where he will be building a school, Griffin meets a woman who is ironically named Joy (Adeola Role). She has built up a wall to protect herself from the constant stream of volunteers who she has learned she will never see again despite their promises. Griffin also meets Jacob (Michael Luwoye), Joy’s brother who works at the compound. They quickly form a bond and Jacob reveals what is really going on with all the schools the volunteers are building. Pastor Jim, who we never meet, immediately sells them for a profit once the volunteers leave.
Looking for answers, Griffin follows Jacob to the market, where he encounters and befriends four teenage orphans—Ronny (Tyrone Davis, Jr.), Grace (Kristolyn Lloyd), Eden (Nicolette Robinson) and Ibrahim (Jamar Williams). Discouraged by the news that his volunteer efforts with the school will result in no real change, Griffin decides that he will instead teach these four teens and Jacob in an abandoned library. As things progress, Griffin realizes that he may be in over his head. His relationships with the students and his determination to make a difference strengthen despite the obstacles.
Throughout the musical, contemporary songs mix with ones of a more Sub-Saharan styling but all are catchy and moving. The choreography by Sergio Trujillo and Darrell Grand Moultrie complements the music wonderfully and adds an energy and power to the performance that is further enhanced by stunning, soulful vocals from the ensemble. A dirt stage is slightly mismatched with the two projection screens, calling attention to the differences between New York City and Uganda.
Diane Paulus directs a talented cast with Role delivering a standout performance as Joy. Mach does what he can with the role of Ryan, though the character seems somewhat less developed than it could be and appears to be an evolving piece in the script based on previous iterations of the production. The climax in the second act seems somewhat muddled, though everything comes together in the end, perhaps too perfectly to properly portray the complicated topics addressed. Invisible Thread is a production which is clearly a result of passion and purpose but it manages to avoid becoming preachy or self-promotional.
Invisible Thread is playing at Second Stage Theater (305 West 43rd St. between 8th and 9th Aves.) through December 27. Tickets range from $69-$125 and can be purchased by calling 212-246-4422 or visiting www.2st.com.
