Stories on stage and screen that engage with, critique, or warn about artificial intelligence (AI) are as much in vogue as AI itself. McNeal, about art and AI, recently concluded its Broadway run; We Are Your Robots and Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience addressed collective veneration of the technology Off-Broadway; and Companion, a twisted and funny exploration of human and nonhuman desire, opened this month in movie theaters. Now, Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, an episodic look at our current technological moment—or precipice—through the artificial eyes of the future, enters the AI discourse at Playwrights Horizons (co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre).
Beckett Briefs, the rubric for three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre, provides a rare look at works by the dramatist whose Waiting for Godot has overshadowed all theater since the mid-20th-century. The progression of plays devised by director Ciarán Hinds moves from the slightest, Not I, featuring only a mouth speaking, to Play, in which only three heads appear, to the longest, and most fruitfully theatrical, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, head to toe. All three works are suffused with regrets about or outrage at the setbacks, blunders, jealousy, and dishonesty in the characters’ lives.
Although the all-Asian, all-female production of Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline by the National American Asian Theatre Company (NAATCO) doesn’t succeed on all dramatic fronts, it’s brimming with vitality. It draws on fairy-tale elements, including a wicked queen, an unscrupulous villain, a wronged hero, and an extended scene of revelations that give it the aura of a fairy tale. Cymbeline perhaps can best be summed up as a myth of national origin that reveals how the British and Roman heritages came together under its ancient, peace-loving title character.
It was the summer of 1947, and Tennessee Williams needed a man—a leading man, that is, for his newest work, a feral little melodrama called A Streetcar Named Desire. Veteran film star John Garfield was the top contender for the part, but as posited in Kowalski, Gregg Ostrin’s seductive, and occasionally true new play, a 23-year-old Marlon Brando won the role of Stanley over the course of a single, drink-filled evening at Williams’s bungalow in Provincetown, Mass.
The cover photo of Stagelight, the playbill for Mindplay, shows Vinny DePonto, its star (and co-writer, with Josh Koenigsberg) with a swarthy, tight-lipped, foreboding visage. He might easily have just emerged from a coffin in Transylvania, but, thankfully, on stage DePonto is engaging, earnest and unthreatening. In explaining the raison d’être of his show, he mentions his own anxieties, including being subject to panic attacks. “Your mind takes over your body if you’re one of those people,” he says. “I’m one of those people.”
Everyone’s having trouble sleeping in Rachel Bonds’ wide-eyed new “nighttime play with music,” Sundown, Yellow Moon. Whether caused by nostalgia or longing, insomnia drives them out into the woods. Unlike Sondheim and Lapine’s fairytale populace, however, with their specific, measurable goals, Bonds’ messy humans are chasing a much more elusive ghost: peace.
Midlife crisis looms large in The Man from Nebraska, a 2003 play by Pulitzer Prize–winner Tracy Letts (August: Osage County). In a series of swift, short scenes, barely punctuated by dialogue, or rather weighted down by silence, Letts delineates the life of the title character, the retired Ken Carpenter—a terrific Reed Birney. His retirement is spent eating at Outback Steakhouse with his wife, Nancy (Annette O’Toole, in an unshowy part rife with anguish and bewilderment), attending church together, and visiting his mother, Cammie, in a nursing home, where she suffers from either dementia or Alzheimer’s. They also see their daughter, Ashley, who lives nearby, although his granddaughter, Natalie, lives farther away.
There’s been no shortage of blame on the Left since Trump’s stinging victory in November. Everyone’s got a pet scapegoat, but nearly all can agree that the Democrats lost in part because they’ve turned their backs on the white working class. The gulf between elites and plebs has never seemed so stark. Into this fraught debate wades Jeff Talbott’s new primal scream of a play, The Gravedigger’s Lullaby. It’s is an interesting tonal shift for Talbott, whose previous play, The Submission, was a knowing, winking story of liberal hypocrisy in the theater. His new work, populated by decidedly un-theatrical, salt-of-the-earth types, is an empathetic attempt to reach across the aisle. It’s an Age of Obama play in the Age of Trump that endeavors to restore the dignity of the working class.
Alan Hruska’s Ring Twice for Miranda, at City Center Stage II, is not the only recent play that features a dystopian society—it joins last year’s Mercury Fur (by Philip Ridley), and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, recently at BAM, and Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, playing at the Signature Theatre Center. Unlike those, however, it has startling echoes of—or perhaps pays homage to—European plays from the middle part of the last century—particularly ones by Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett and Jean Giraudoux.
Thornton Wilder is best remembered as the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker, the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly! But his third great play, The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Elia Kazan in 1943, won the Pulitzer Prize, yet the tragicomedy is more spoken about than seen, perhaps because its demands are formidable. Wilder, a great experimentalist, uses every trick in the book to chart the survival of mankind, in the persons of the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J., through the Ice Age, the Flood, untold wars and starving refugees.
Noah Mease’s play Omega Kids takes its name from a fictional comic book at the center of its story. In the comic, eight super-powered teens regroup in their hideaway following the traumatic loss of their leader. The weight of the past and apprehension for the future create a recriminatory atmosphere that threatens to turn violent until Kyle Kelley, the “Insomniac,” puts everyone to sleep. When Lucas Augur, “recently magical,” wakes up, he and Kyle take the first halting steps toward romance, acting on an attraction that until now has been merely implicit. The play itself is about a different pair of traumatized youths stumbling toward connection. What they’re looking for in each other, however, can’t be so easily classified.
The working class as a subject for drama has caught on since Donald Trump was voted into office—although prescient playwrights had cottoned to the richness of the issue well before the election. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, presented at the Public Theater in November, is moving to Broadway next month, but it had already been in the works a year before. James Anthony Tyler’s Dolphins and Sharks, now at the Labyrinth Theater, is equally worthy of notice. Although the Labyrinth production is billed as a world premiere, Tyler’s play has been in development since 2015.
More than heated chess competitions occupies the center of Cándido Tirado’s New York premiere of Fish Men at INTAR, as five men who gather around the chess tables in Washington Square Park maneuver for higher stakes than mere checkmates in a game.
There should be a whole new word for “disheveled” to describe Jeff McCarthy in Kunstler. As William Kunstler in Jeffrey Sweet’s one-act snapshot of the liberal 20th-century lawyer, McCarthy looks terrible, sporting un-manicured sideburns, messy gray hair with Poindexter eyeglasses nestled in it, an awful tie, and a suit that looks like it was rolled around in dirt before curtain. The look reinforces that this legal near-icon wasn’t into appearances, and it jibes nicely with the shambling, authority-challenging portrait McCarthy and Sweet paint. After a strong beginning, Kunstler settles down into wandering monologue, and leaves some vital questions about its subject insufficiently answered. Still, this Kunstler-at-law is lively company.
Orion, a new play by Matthew McLachlan and directed by Joshua Warr, opened on Valentine’s Day, but the theatrical lovefest dishes out more than sweet nothings. Indeed, this playwright’s first full-length production serves up handfuls of hearty truths.
In 2015 the New Group staged Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, a brutal vision of depravity amid the detritus of a wrecked civilization. Now the same company, under the same director, Scott Elliott, is presenting Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a more subdued yet insinuating take on a society heading in the same direction. Yet the atmosphere is vastly different.
Donald Margulies, one of the most accomplished American playwrights, is probably less famous than he should be, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends (2000) and notable achievements such as Collected Stories (1996) and Time Stands Still (2010). It’s unlikely that the shoestring production of Sight Unseen at the charming Access Theater will add significantly to his reputation, but an exceptional cast and astute direction make the quaint, four-flight walkup worthwhile for theater lovers. (An elevator is also available.)
“Remember that one Thanksgiving when your nearest and dearest sat down for a quiet game of Monopoly, but then your grandma got drunk and revealed a rich tradition of inbreeding? Well, tonight should be something like that…except with a lot more vodka.”
Yours Unfaithfully, an unpublished, “un-romantic comedy” by Miles Malleson, gives its audience an intimate look at what it could be like to live in an open marriage, in 1933 and now. Mint Theater artistic director Jonathan Bank has unearthed Yours Unfaithfully and is presenting the world premiere.
Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.
The third edition of AdA: Author Directing Author has programmed three one-acts based on the theme of power. This year AdA founders Neil LaBute and Marco Calvani are joined by Spanish playwright Marta Buchaca, with each presenting a play directed by one of the others.
DannyKrisDonnaVeronica is a captivating production about the modern family structure and the often untold truths of being a parent. Playwright Lawrence Dial explores the reality of marriage and life after children. Although it often seems taboo to speak about the visceral feelings of sadness and hopelessness associated with being a parent, Dial’s play explores the dichotomy of being completely enamored by one’s children while harboring feelings of dismay—the joys of having a family as well as those hidden, or rather, silent, moments of losing one’s identity and becoming irrelevant.
Back in 1996, Martin McDonagh, a 25-year-old playwright, made a stunning debut with his play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, revitalizing that old war horse, the well-made play. Within a few years, he had several more successes under his belt: A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West joined Leenane to form a trilogy, not to mention his Aran Islands plays, The Cripple of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (a third is still expected for a second trilogy).
He was a jack of all trades artistic and master of them all. Trendsetter and admired cultural icon, Noel Coward was a British actor, playwright, dancer, composer and lyricist of songs, musicals and operettas, screenwriter and director, painter, novelist, and diarist, whose style, rapier wit, and intellect dominated the worlds of British theater and entertainment throughout the 1930’s, ’40s, and ’50s. Coward is the larger-than-life subject of Simon Green and David Shrubsole’s intimate evening Life Is for Living: Conversations with Coward at 59E59 Theaters. The presentation, the newest in a series of this British team’s collaborations devoted to Coward, uses Coward’s songs with excerpts from his diaries, verse, and letters, to offer us a glimpse into the breadth, artistry, life, and wit of the Master.
This Day Forward continues playwright Nicky Silver’s meditation on parent-child relationships that he made a success of with The Lyons. His caustic new play focuses on the damage that parents can inflict on children—it’s a broad canvas of emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse, distilled into two acts set a generation apart.
