Inspired by a true story, Max Mondi’s Maybe Tomorrow is a new drama that pushes the envelope on what it means to get stuck in the present. Directed by Chad Austin, this play takes a deep dive into mental illness and more.
Maybe Tomorrow
Last Call
Peter Danish’s Last Call is a fairy tale with heroes, villains, operatic emotions, and a countertenor. It’s a three-actor play set in the magical kingdom of classical music during the era of two potentates, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), who reigned supreme in concert halls and recording studios around the world for much of the 20th century.
Vanya
A one-man Uncle Vanya could easily have come off as a stunt. How do you turn an Anton Chekhov staple, one that has visited New York stages multiple times in the past few seasons alone, into a solo show, and an utterly new experience? But Vanya turns out to be good theater and, more surprisingly, very good Chekhov.
We Had a World
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in his opening line of Anna Karenina, and Joshua Harmon shows that every unhappy family member is unhappy in her own way in We Had a World, his stirring new play that gets at universal truths through a very personal story.
Amerikin
For all the theater community’s opposition to Donald Trump, there have been relatively few stage works taking on Trumpism. Amerikin, by Chisa Hutchinson, looks like it could be one during its first half, with its portrayal of “just your white supremacists next door,” but the story heads in a different direction when new characters and themes are introduced in Act II. Though her first act is definitely stronger, Hutchinson overall has crafted an absorbing look at life in these United States.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has one of drama’s greatest female roles—Blanche DuBois, perhaps only rivaled by Shaw’s St. Joan and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It’s a theatrical mountain that any serious actress would like to scale, and Patsy Ferran deserves credit for doing so, even if the Almeida Theatre production visiting BAM from London comes up short. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this Streetcar also features the better-known Paul Mescal (of Gladiator II renown) as Stanley Kowalski.
Dakar 2000
In the 1990s, Rajiv Joseph spent three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Dakar 2000, currently at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), draws on the playwright’s memories of that experience and his understanding of East Africa at the advent of the new millennium.
Sumo
Lisa Sanaye Dring’s Sumo, co-produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company, comes to the Public Theater after an earlier run at La Jolla Playhouse, and specifically addresses an audience whom it assumes knows little about the ancient Japanese art and sport of sumo. And so Drang’s play becomes an opportunity to teach about this sacred ritual, and actually show it to us, while also crafting a story of a rebellious young underdog’s rise to the top against a hostile mentor.
Grangeville
Grangeville, the title of Samuel D. Hunter’s new piece is, as in most of his plays—Pocatello, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements (but not The Whale)—the Idaho setting of his latest drama, a two-hander about estranged half-brothers coming together to rehash a lot of anguished family history. If the result is disappointing, it’s because Hunter is working over well-tilled ground.
Ghosts
In 1881, Ibsen’s Ghosts was considered shocking for its critique of conventional morality and its unabashed treatment of venereal disease and religious hypocrisy, among other topics. While the specifics of the social issues that the characters grapple with are not pressing today—syphilis is a curable disease, a woman trying to leave an unhappy marriage is not unthinkable, nor is the idea that a person of high social rank might be a degenerate—moral hypocrisy, patriarchy, class resentment, and generational trauma are always ripe for the stage. The gripping, finely acted production of Ghosts now playing at Lincoln Center, directed by Jack O’Brien and adapted by Mark O’Rowe, threads this needle: it retains the historical setting (though with a framing device) and yet makes the moral debates feel like more than artifacts from another era.
All Nighter
All Nighter is the third play by Natalie Margolin that follows college-age female friends during one night, and like her earlier works—The Party Hop, created for an all-star Zoom production during the pandemic, and The Power of Punctuation, staged Off-Broadway in 2016—it showcases the mores and conversational styles of a certain generation of women. All Nighter also showcases excellent performances by five young actresses who have already garnered acclaim.
Deep Blue Sound
The Clubbed Thumb theater company follows up last year’s excellent Grief Hotel with another gem that originated in its Summerworks program, Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound, in which a group of islanders in the Pacific Northwest mourn the disappearance of a nearby pod of orca whales. The production, in residency at the Public Theater, is astonishing: Koogler’s play is both strange and naturalistic, as funny as it is deeply moving, even shattering; Arin Arbus’s note-perfect direction is mesmerizing, smartly enhancing the emotional climaxes but never overdoing them; and the ensemble of nine is simply extraordinary.
Wounded
Wounded, by Jiggs Burgess, is both gritty and warm. Digging into dark subjects such as alcoholism, drunk driving, co-dependent relationships, the alienation of being gay in a small town, and sexual assault, the play also shows how, in the face of adversity, humanity still shines through in some people.
The Price
Within the broader body of Arthur Miller’s plays, The Price (1967) aligns with the playwright’s reputation for intense, timely, and provocative work. Director Noelle McGrath’s tightly crafted staging for the Village Theater Group’s inaugural production amplifies this intensity and the long-term impact of the Great Depression on its characters. The audience is left to peel back complex layers of each one’s subjective truths and enduring traumas.
‘The Audit’ and ‘The American Dream’
One-act plays are rarely staged in New York—with the exception of a recent Irish Rep bill of Beckett shorts—so Urban Stages deserves credit for undertaking two new ones, each about 50 minutes long. The plays are the result of a competition for one-acts with two characters, under the umbrella title Dynamic Duos; the two winners were chosen from about 300 submissions.
Truth Be Told
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.
Curse of the Starving Class
In the late 1970s, when playwright Sam Shepard decided to move on from his short experimental works staged at La Mama in the East Village, the Royal Court in London, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, he turned to the American theater’s standby—a dysfunctional family. The result was the three-act Curse of the Starving Class. The disintegrating family would be the focus of True West and Buried Child, perhaps his two most famous works, but the seeds are already sprouting wildly in Curse.
Garside’s Career
The Mint Theater Company is doing what it does best: acquainting audiences with a long-ago play, and author, most people have probably never heard of. Here the author is Harold Brighouse, and the play, Garside’s Career. Billed by the Mint as “bright, witty political satire,” it traverses more genres than that, also taking in domestic drama and commentary on relations between the sexes, and serves as parable about misplaced ambition. The production is mostly excellent. The bright and the witty are relative.
Liberation
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
Still
At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”