For a while in Ken Urban’s play A Guide for the Homesick, the author’s subject seems predictable. Set in Amsterdam, near Schiphol airport, the two-hander opens with a tall, strapping black man named Teddy (McKinley Belcher III) inviting a younger, white backpacker into his room. They’ve just met at a hotel bar, where the backpacker, Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger), has missed his flight. Teddy offers his guest a beer and a floor to sleep on, but the situation vibrates with sexual tension.
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.
Matthew Freeman’s play The Ask seems deceptively simple on the surface and remains so for quite a while. Two women are meeting in an Upper West Side apartment. The older woman is a well-known photographer, and coffee-table art books (Alice Neel, e.g.) lie on the floor of her apartment; photographs (by Cindy Sherman, among others) adorn the walls. Craig Napoliello’s impressively detailed set evokes solid wealth—the reason the younger woman is paying a call.
Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade, a queer musical-memoir that marries narrative and song, has returned to the Wild Project for a limited engagement. Directed by Lisa Peterson, Sobule (music, lyrics, and concept) shares her life story thus far, cleverly drawing upon her stultifying days in seventh grade as a jumping-off point to examine her life beyond middle school.
Leegrid Stevens’s A Peregrine Falls, now at the Wild Project under the direction of Padraic Lillis, tells the story of a Mormon family in Austin, Texas, in 2010 and 2012, as they grapple with the aftermath of horrific family abuse. The play combines realism, in scenes taking place in hospital and state-court waiting areas and a family-owned car dealership (scenic design by Zoë Hurwitz), with flights of dream imagery and symbolism, the latter mostly conveyed by a narrator who is both within and without the story (the peregrine of the title stands for the ultimate predator, a bird who preys on other birds).
Jordan Jaffe’s comedy-drama Whirlwind hinges on a hot topic: environmental activism. It’s also descriptive of the relationships at its center. Bethany Goodbridge (Annapurna Sriram) handles issues of environment, health and safety at Arrow Energy, a San Francisco firm that builds wind farms. Her boss, Cooper (Johnny Wu), is an arrogant corporate type who likes to brag that he has his own jet. He also has more than a businesslike eye on her. Christian Conn plays the man who brings the whirlwind into their lives and ruffles their feathers—an apt description, since he is irate that one of the company’s isolated wind farms is killing birds at a terrible rate.
Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home, a trio of monologues about the postwar experiences of veterans, focuses on the insurmountable stresses on those who have been emotionally and psychologically scarred by war. Author J.A. Moad II, who has written and performs the plays, is himself a veteran. It is, perhaps, impossible for a civilian who has never endured combat to understand what it’s like, but civilian vs. military mindsets have underpinned plays from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to David Hare’s Plenty (1978), whose heroine Susan Traherne, after fighting for the French Resistance, thrashes about in an unfulfilling civilian life that can never excite her as much as living on the knife’s edge.
In a Little Room, a delightful new black comedy by Pete McElligott, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Ten Bones Theatre Company, shows obvious influences of of Albee, Sartre and especially Beckett, but McElligott has his own voice. The play focuses on two primary characters, Manning (Jeb Kreager) and Charlie (Luis-Daniel Morales), who meet in a hospital waiting room on a very bad day. Initially, they try to conduct a whispered conversation to avoid waking another occupant, who is sleeping (David Triacca, who undertakes multiple roles), and then manage to wake him anyway with amusing ineptitude.
Villa, written and directed by Guillermo Calderón, opens on three women who are considering a scale model of the “villa,” a place in Chile where, in the 1970s under military dictator Augusto Pinochet (who ruled from 1973–90), atrocities were carried out, predominantly against women. One of the three, who are present-day Chileans, suggests making it into a Disneyland-like theme park of terror. There are other suggestions, too, but when they try to vote, each time a “spoiled ballot” appears that implies at any given time, one of them cannot be impartial—and the vote must be unanimous.
