In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
Drew Tatum, a character in Brittany K. Allen’s play Redwood, would never want to be one of those white people who says something like “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could”—that infamous line in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. During an uncomfortable encounter with a Black person, Drew does say, “The woman I love is Black. Oh, God, I swore I’d never say that to prove a point.”
Chasing Happy, a new play by Michel Wallerstein, takes its name from the title of a best-selling, posthumously published book by John Ryan, the late partner of the play’s main character, Nick. John was killed by a gunman at a Pride parade, a crime that Nick calls “random.” Based on the excerpts Nick reads from the memoir cum self-help tome, John—who was born post-Stonewall and lived in Provincetown, Mass.—was wracked with self-loathing and shame about his homosexuality and remained closeted with many people. His book offers such banal affirmations as “I exist, I am worthy, I am love” and “Let me become who I truly am.” (Another character describes it as “one big stew of Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle, mixed with some gay cliché stuff.”)
The Making of a Great Moment is, at least the press release implies, supposed to be about a cross-country bike trip. But it turns out that Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s play at Urban Stages is mostly about other things. Maybe even calling it a “play” isn’t quite right; it’s closer to performance art, or an actors’ exercise, a chance for Bill Bowers and Esther Williamson to try on a closetful of identities, all the while philosophizing about the meaning of art, the meaning of life, the value of performing. Which they attack with great enthusiasm, at times making you forget the banality of much of the material. Is The Making of a Great Moment interesting? Sometimes. But it lacks discipline.
Emma Horwitz’s new comedy, Mary Gets Hers, is a quirky coming-of-age story. Inspired by a 10th-century comedy, Abraham, by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, Horwitz has retooled her work for contemporary audiences, with a lot of tomfoolery folded in, and director Josiah Davis, Horwitz’s long-time collaborator, has cast women in all the roles.
The stakes are high, and quite pointy, in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. In this jocular take on that jugular-loving creature of the night, blood is sucked, true love is tested and vanity finds a way to survive in the soul of a monster who ironically cannot cast his own reflection in a mirror. Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic tale provides the groundwork, but the spirit of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and the ghost of Charles Ludlam, lift the evening to its batty heights.
Actress-playwright-comedian Nancy Redman has returned to the Chain Studio Theatre for the third run of her one-woman show, A Séance with Mom. Directed by Austin Pendleton, the piece is performed on a bare stage, with only a chair, small table, and walker at its side. Its six characters are conjured up by Redman with her expressive voice, elastic face, and physical comedy. Redman, who has been described as a cross-fertilization of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, steers clear of politics, preferring to take a deep dive into family relationships and the human condition.
With TV star Marcia Cross and beloved stage actor Bryan Batt in the cast, two Tony winners on the design team, and recognizable names among the producers, Pay the Writer would appear to be a solidly financed production. Yet it has a kind of low-rent look to it and clunky staging.
For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life.
Dav Pilkey has endeared himself to children—and adults—through his graphic novels and multiple hit comic-book series. Beginning in 1990, he created the bestselling series Cat Kid Comic Club. Now, playwright and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila (best known for his Drama Desk Award-winning performance in the musical Some Like It Hot) and composer Brad Alexander have adapted the series into Cat Kid Comic Club The Musical.
The Second Stage production of Toros deserves a prominent spot in New York theater annals thanks to Frank Wood’s tenderly compelling portrayal of Tica, a golden retriever on her last legs. Danny Tejera’s sometimes comedic drama is a largely slice-of-life depiction of three privileged, emotionally stunted millennials living in Spain after the election of President Donald J. Trump and just before the onslaught of COVID-19. Tica—loyal, empathetic, and loving—is a foil to the humans rather than the play’s focus. Wood’s impeccable performance is calibrated to avoid upstaging the other actors, yet his Tica is the most memorable aspect of this arresting, if sometimes unsatisfying, play.
“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.
Betty Shamieh’s Malvolio, a joyous sequel to Twelfth Night, investigates the life of Malvolio after the events in Shakespeare’s wintry dark comedy. In the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production, 20 years have passed since Olivia’s much-abused steward (Allen Gilmore) threatened revenge on his tormentors. Back then, Malvolio was tricked into believing the Countess Olivia, his mistress, had written a love letter to him and insisting he don yellow, cross-gartered stockings to please her. Swallowing the bait, Malvolio did as the letter requested—and swiftly was incarcerated in Illyria as a lunatic.
Brothers Bob and Tobly McSmith have created a cottage industry of musicals based—unauthorized, they always make it clear—on popular movies and TV shows of the past 30 years. They even have a cottage for their industry: the Theater Center at 50th and Broadway, where their new show Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing has joined The Office! The Musical Parody and Friends: The Musical Parody in repertory.
Memory, when conveyed on stage, traditionally arrives in the form of a flashback, or a soliloquy. But in John J. Caswell, Jr.’s frantic and surreal family drama Wet Brain, memory is a foreign object to be cut from the stomach, or a hypersonic shared experience that blasts through outer space even as it is grounded in that most triggering of locales, the family room in the house of a decidedly dysfunctional brood.
The National Asian American Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet may just go down as the season’s most misdirected production. Employing Hansol Jung’s modern-verse adaptation as its text, codirectors Jung and Dustin Wills no doubt intended to revamp Shakespeare’s tragedy by leaning into its comedy to point up the darker aspects. But what one gets is a travesty of the play.
Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.
Lucie Tiberghien, artistic director of Molière in the Park, has scored a coup—an English-language world premiere of Tartuffe that uses Moliere’s uncensored version as its basis. Tiberghien’s production is the first English rendering to draw on a restoration of the original text by Georges Forestier that played in 2022 at the Comédie Française.
“The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” The words are those of Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens, and the philosophy gets a healthy workout in Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain, Joe Baer’s one-man retrospective of the life and works—but mostly the life—of America’s great author. Baer loves his subject, and he works up a worthy retelling of Clemens’s life and times. He might have labored harder to carry them into a modern perspective, but it’s still a pleasant, leisurely ride.
The veneer of civilization is thinner than one hopes for in Yasmina Reza’s 2009 Tony-winning black comedy God of Carnage, admirably revived by Theater Breaking Through Barriers. The set-up is simple. Two couples are meeting after Benjamin, the 11-year-old son of one couple, hit Henry, the son of the other, with a stick and damaged two teeth. Henry’s parents, Michael and Veronica Novak (Dave Fazio and Christiane Noll), pressured him to reveal Benjamin’s name, and they have invited Benjamin’s parents, Annette and Alan Raleigh (Corey Cox and David Burtka) to their well-appointed home to exchange “statements” about the incident.
Fiasco Theater, in a joint production with Red Bull Theater, takes on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was a flop when it premiered in 1607. Though it has been occasionally revived, the play is mostly of scholarly interest: Beaumont is best-known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as writer-in-residence of the King’s Men, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle is Beaumont’s only play written alone. If the comedy doesn’t offer up the richness or complexity of Shakespeare, Fiasco is clearly drawn to its story of topsy-turvy community-building through theater.
