Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.
Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
“Triple threat” has a double meaning for Broadway veteran James T. Lane. As a performer who can sing, dance and act, he is a triple threat in theater parlance. But, as he acknowledges in his solo autobiographical play of the same name, he has also faced a triple threat of challenges in his life: Black, gay, addict.
Lanford Wilson’s 1975 play The Mound Builders centers on an archaeological excavation in Illinois of a pre-Columbian civilization, a conceit rich in metaphor and suggestion, and expressed in often-lyrical language. (The mounds in question refer to the earthworks constructed by the early inhabitants of the area.) The historical reach and resonance of the concept is combined with the claustrophobia of domestic dysfunction: the play was described in the New York Times review of the original Circle Repertory Company production as “an epic in the guise of a family drama.”
Set on Midsummer’s Eve (June 23), Micheál mac Liammóir’s The Mountains Look Different is about a woman’s attempt to reinvent herself through marriage following years of working as a prostitute in London. First performed at the Gate Theater in Dublin, the noted Irish actor’s play was applauded for its openness by critics and audiences in 1948, but it was also disdained by the God-fearing and narrow-minded Catholic community. However bold it was then, by today’s standards director Aidan Redmond’s revival offers audiences little more than a diorama, a 3-D representation of a bygone era.
