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.
The afterlife of outlaw Elmer McCurdy was as brilliant as his failed life of train and bank robbery was bleak. In the new musical Dead Outlaw, David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna (music and lyrics), and Itamar Moses (book) team up with director David Cromer to tell the true story of a turn-of-the-century outlaw who became a famous carnival attraction after his untimely death.
The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.
The tensions between life and art, and between experience and imagination, lie at the heart of the 2003 chamber musical A Man of No Importance. When it premiered, Roger Rees played the homosexual director of a Dublin theater company in the 1960s, suffering from period repression and bigotry. Classic Stage Company’s revival stars Jim Parsons, the Big Bang Theory actor who apparently wants to demonstrate his acting and singing abilities beyond his Sheldon character—and succeeds.
“Moriarty was dead, to begin with.” That’s the first line of A Sherlock Carol, now at New World Stages, and it will be repeated many times, for attempted comic effect. It’s a paraphrase, of course, of Charles Dickens’s first line of A Christmas Carol, and it illustrates the determination of Mark Shanahan, who wrote and directed, to fuse two beloved British authors. Let’s put Scrooge on that stage, he figures, and inject as much Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as we can, and we’ll create a jolly new holiday-season hit. He figures.
