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.
Considering it has a cast of two, The Meeting: The Interpreter is a very busy production. The actors, Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, move all over the stage—standing here, kneeling there, spinning around in wheeled chairs, dancing a little—and Curran, who plays multiple characters, repeatedly switches her costume or wig. Video, puppets, sound effects and a slew of props are also part of the action.
André & Dorine, a masked drama and physical theater show from the Spanish company Kulunka Teatro, presents the life of a family as they confront a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s for the matriarch, Dorine. This heartfelt play captures the frustration and roller-coaster of emotions that families undergo when caring for a family member with the disease.
X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation by Marcus Gardley is not only a portrait of Malcolm X, the optimistic and eloquent civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1965, but also of a dangerous and tumultuous time. In Gardley's play, time and place dissolve from one scene into another—a courtroom, the home of Malcolm (poignantly played by Jimmon Cole) and his wife, Betty Shabazz (Obie winner Roslyn Ruff), as well as the street; an office; and the home of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. In all the scenes Gardley focuses on a question that dominates the court: who killed Malcolm X?
Decades after his death, Robert Moses’s legacy is still felt throughout New York City, from the Triborough Bridge to Lincoln Center. As the urban planner responsible for much of the city’s 20th-century roadways and infrastructure projects, Moses had a polarizing career, making lasting improvements to the city and the surrounding area even as he was criticized for imposing his plans, no matter the consequences. New Yorkers traveling through Moses’s former domain to the Theatre at St. Clements, however, will find little unique insight into the man behind the infrastructure at Bulldozer: The Ballad of Robert Moses, a bio-musical of the master builder who outlasted mayors and governors to impose his will on New York City and the surrounding area from the 1920s through the 1960s.
The advertising campaign for Come Light My Cigarette promises a “suspenseful” evening and features a photo of Erikka Walsh gotten up in Sam Spade trench coat and fedora. Indeed, there’s mystery about this mildly noir-ish musical, written and directed by Arnold L. Cohen; but what’s offstage is more provocative than what’s visible in the auditorium of the Theatre at St. Clement’s.
