Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
Kafkaesque!, a clever new musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by James Harvey, draws together the life of Czech novelist Franz Kafka and his major (and one minor) works. The show opens with Kafka (Harvey, a talented composer and pianist) at the piano as he defines who he is: a writer whose work has had so much impact that he’s become an adjective. The opening song about “the evils of bureaucracy, modernity’s alienation, man’s talent for hypocrisy, neuroses and fixation!” showcases the main themes of Kafka’s work that are woven together in the musical.
The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.
Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
The Pershing Square Signature Center
Part coming-of-age story, part domestic drama, and part mystery tale, Jordan Seavey’s The Seven Year Disappear is a deeply unsettling work that ponders the thorny question: How far should an artist go to mine his or her life for art? Directed by Scott Elliott, Seavey’s play reveals the darker side of the art world, when a renowned artist disappears for seven years and her son goes into free fall.
People can be damaged by those they love or admire. They can sometimes be repaired, too, with the help of others. And often the shared desire to be healed is a salve in itself. Such are the truths swirling beneath the meditation and mindfulness sessions on display in The Fears. It is a toss-up as to whether playwright Emma Sheanshang has crafted a strikingly sad comedy or a quite funny drama. The play’s seven characters all walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy. And because the action is set in a Buddhist center, they do so without their shoes.
Donja R. Love’s new play, One in Two, captures the truth, humor, pain, love and realism of being a full-fledged human: specifically a black, gay or bisexual man living with HIV. It’s a beautiful, albeit graphic, story of Donté, a community, a life—many lives.
