“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”
Written in 2000 and inspired by the Y2K scare, Eric Bogosian’s dark apocalyptic play Humpty Dumpty is finally receiving its New York premiere after debuting at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., in 2002. At that time, Bogosian’s script included dialogue that eerily foreshadowed the September 11 attacks. Now it serves as a cautionary tale about mankind’s dependence on technology.
In Two Minds is a new Irish play about the way a mother and daughter's intimate relationship is tested by mental illness. Playwright Joanne Ryan has constructed a story in which a mother’s behavior, resulting from bipolar disorder, tests her daughter’s resolve, love and support. Daughter (the characters are unnamed) knows she has little control to prevent her mother’s descent into depression, like watching a sinking ship. The play presents two portraits of the bipolar’s emotional toll compassionately but accurately. It is gritty and unflinching.
With Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams pay homage to their foremothers in downtown queer performance—collaborative troupes like Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers that produced freewheeling entertainments infused with sapphic sensibilities yet typically without any linear story.
Upon the 1904 opening of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov notoriously fumed, “Stanislavski has ruined my play!” The playwright envisioned his work as a comedy with elements of farce, a stark contrast to the tragic conception of the renowned Moscow Art Theatre director. One wonders what these two artistic giants would think of the current interpretation now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews, this Donmar Warehouse production from London is spare, farcical, interactive, and grooves to an indie-music beat. While purists may scoff at this cheeky approach to Chekhov, this is a Cherry Orchard for our times.
Written in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, William Cameron’s Truth Be Told provides a lens into the grieving mind of a mother of a mass murderer. Directed by Kim T. Sharp, and sensitively performed by Francesca Ravera and Michelle Park, this searing psychological drama invites one to confront the elusive nature of truth.
