This production has transferred to the Women’s Project Theater (2162 Broadway at 76th) and will run through Jan. 19. For tickets and more information, visit mrssternwanders.com.
Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
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.
There’s a neon display over the mezzanine bar in the spanking new A.R.T./New York Theatres on 53rd Street that reads, “Why are you here and not somewhere else?” It’s an apt distillation of Richard Maxwell’s eccentric Samara, which has just opened there. Maxwell’s odyssey, artfully wrangled by Soho Rep Artistic Director Sarah Benson, invokes the ghosts of Shakespeare and Brecht to question the very notion of making and attending theater.
Lowell Byers’s play Luft Gangster was inspired by the real-life story of Louis Fowler, a waist gunner during World War II. The play opens on a tender scene between Lou (played by Byers himself with a wonderful mix of stoicism and sincerity), and his mother, who is clearly sick or mentally ill. Louis’s father is long dead, and when his mother dies, he enlists to fight. His plane is shot down and he is captured and interrogated by the Nazis, but they don’t get a word out of him. At first he’s put in a makeshift holding cell where he is joined by another flier, Joe, played with a wonderful earnestness by Sean Hoagland, who doubts they’ll get out alive. Lou tells him, “I don’t think it’s my time to go.” Joe retorts: “I just hope they know that.”
The theater has not been kind to the English port city of Ipswich lately. Alecky Blythe’s documentary musical London Road, a huge hit for London’s National Theatre and recently made into a film featuring a singing Tom Hardy (no, really), shows Ipswich’s working class to be petty and vindictive. In the revival of Henry Naylor’s Echoes, part of a double bill with new play Angel at the Brits Off Broadway festival, Ipswich is such a “dungheap” that it drives two women into the arms of religious extremists in Afghanistan and Syria. Compared to the hellscapes in which the women of Naylor’s “Arabian Nightmares” find themselves, though, Ipswich is the Garden of Eden.
Halfway through Picnic, the 1953 William Inge comedy-drama playing at Judson Gym (in repertory with Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba), a hunky vagabond named Hal fidgets disconsolately while posing for a quick-sketch portrait. When the artist, thwarted by Hal’s restlessness, urges him to relax and be “natural,” Hal laments, “Gee, that’s hard.”
Secularism and faith square off in Zayd Dohrn’s The Profane, a play that takes as its focus two American families of Middle Eastern extraction. The premise is that a young couple from different backgrounds have fallen in love: It’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? with a 21st-century spin. Dohrn hasn’t strayed far from the formula, which includes parent-child friction, sibling rivalry and the occasional dollop of comical culture clash.
Nobody involved in the production of Casablanca expected it to be a hit, let alone win the Best Picture Oscar and go on to be considered one of the quintessentially quotable classic Hollywood films. If CasablancaBox, the new behind-the-scenes ensemble drama at HERE Arts Center, is to be believed, no one really wanted to make the film either. That we’re still watching it and talking about it 75 years later proves William Goldman’s famous dictum that in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.”
There’s a famous joke about a man who prays for years to win the lottery. He tries to live a righteous life and promises to use the money for good, but his prayers grow increasingly bitter. One day, as he’s leaving church, having given God an earful, the clouds part and a voice booms, “Hey, moron, you have to buy a ticket!” A Gambler’s Guide to Dying, which launches 59E59’s 13th annual Brits Off Broadway festival this week, is about a man for whom buying the ticket is more than good advice; it’s his life philosophy.
“This is not a moral place,” proclaims a master of ceremonies at the outset of the Pearl Theatre Company’s energetic Vanity Fair. “Nor is it often a merry one,” he adds, “for all of its pageantry and noise.”
There is an immense amount of ambition on stage at 13th Street Repertory Theatre right now, where Judson Blake’s Perversion, directed by the author, recently began performances. The play, an absurdist anti-war jeremiad, embodies that plucky, can-do spirit that has animated downtown theater since the Provincetown Players invaded MacDougal Street 100 years ago. That a group of independent artists have gathered in a 65-seater in the basement of a mid-19th-century Village brownstone to tell an original political story in this Wicked theatrical world is cause for celebration. That the resulting work is so wrong-headed on nearly every level is merely a sobering reminder that ambition without craft is simply hubris.
Daniel’s Husband is one of those plays where, halfway through, something so unexpected, plot-altering, and tone-shifting happens that it just can’t be revealed. Michael McKeever’s comedy-drama about the still-new era of gay marriage is cleft in two—part one: comedy, part two: drama—and both halves are effective, if you’re willing to accept some questionable behavior on the part of the title character.
The two WASPish couples at the center of Sarah Ruhl’s sexy/bonkers magical realist tragicomedy How to Transcend a Happy Marriage could have walked in from any number of other American plays. You know the type: they read The Atlantic, wear Joy Division T-shirts un-ironically, start each new year by reading a play, and fall over themselves to avoid the appearance of political incorrectness. Their living rooms are the familiar battlegrounds of bourgeois drama from Akhtar to Zola. The bloody goat carcass suspended over David Zinn’s set, though, makes it clear that we’re in the Ruhl-iverse, and little about the next two hours will be business-as-usual.
"While the radical composer John Cage (1912–92) was alive, it seemed easier to dismiss him as an irritating crackpot than it does now."
That rhetorical flourish, from critic Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times, is as outlandish as any of Cage's own colorful, self-conscious proclamations; but it captures the crescendo of acclaim accorded this American avant-garde composer over the 25 years since his death. Macaulay's recent assertion that "no study of 20th-century music is complete without Cage" would have been argumentative a quarter century ago. Now it's an accepted tenet of commentary on music history.
At the start of Michael Weller’s Loose Ends, splashing waves are projected onto a screen that is surrounded by photo collages as two lovebirds embrace each other on a moonlit Balinese beach in 1970. Sensitive Paul (Loren Bidner) courts distant Susan (Sarah Mae Vink) as he shares with her his exotic adventures in the Peace Corps. Susan childishly responds by retelling the story of when she was 11 years old and had her tonsils cremated. Their passionate moment in seclusion suddenly fizzles out when Susan’s offbeat, chatterbox friend, Janice (Melanie Glancy), finds them with her trusty flashlight. Janice is worried because Susan never returned from her evening walk.
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.
The Fourth Street Theater is currently unrecognizable, as the theater company known as Semiotic Root has transformed the space into an intimate storytelling café—the sort found in North Africa. A patchwork of Persian carpets covers every inch of the floor, and hanging lanterns cast a warm glow across the carved wooden tables and plush floor cushions. The scent of strong coffee wafts through the air, and audience members are invited to help themselves to a cup. The setting is for playwright Betty Shamieh’s The Strangest, an absurdist murder mystery inspired by the unnamed Arab killed in Albert Camus’ classic novel, The Stranger, which is an emblem of mid-20th-century French existentialism.
The Weather Underground Organization, also know as the Weathermen, was a grassroots collective of white radical leftists who subscribed to a militant, anti-capitalist ideology. Splintering off from a larger organization called Students for Democratic Society (SDS) in the late 1960s, the Weather Underground believed in violence as a form of protest. Home/Sick is The Assembly’s theatrical reimagining of the Weather Underground’s founding, development, and eventual disbandment. Written collectively by members of The Assembly, Home/Sick is a dynamic and thorough piece of devised theater that highlights the complex philosophies, political struggles, and practical idiosyncrasies behind the Weather Underground’s bygone revolution.
The variety of lights—glittering constellations, moon, explosions, electrical mishaps, the earth—that Russell H. Champa has produced abundantly in The Light Years are inventive and terrific. They don’t, however, illuminate what playwrights Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are getting at. Inspired by Bos’s childhood remembrances of family members who spoke of two world’s fairs held in Chicago, in 1893 and 1933, and by director Oliver Butler, who knew about real-life theatrical impresario Steele Mackaye, a forgotten innovator. Developed by Bos and Thureen for the Debate Society, The Light Years is a sort of pageant play glorifying scientific progress and human aspirations in the form of the inventions presented at the American expositions.
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.
