Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
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.”
It’s possible that The Wild Parrots of Campbell, set in a suburb of San Jose, may well call to mind the 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Whether the parrots in the film have by now migrated to the South Bay is not a concern of playwright Alex Riad’s blistering nuclear-family drama. They’re a side note in a work that doesn’t have ornithology on its mind.
We are all connected. Nothing is random; things happen for a reason. Be nice to your siblings. These are some ideas one might discern from Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee, but to say the play is a reflection on these—or any other—themes would be far too generous to this massive misfire that tells three different stories, with barely a sentence of realistic-sounding dialogue among them.
Not so much a “he said/she said” as a “he pontificates,” MsTrial marks the playwriting debut of Dep Kirkland, a former prosecutor who obviously has insights to share about the legal system. It’s ironic, then, that a scene set during a legal proceeding is where the play goes awry.
Stephen Brown’s Everything Is Super Great presents a group of likable, oddball, and somewhat hapless characters who don’t really fit in anywhere in the suburban Texas world they inhabit, but bond with one another amid unexpected circumstances. The word “great” works in the play as a form of deliberate denial, but also something genuinely hopeful: life is a series of vexations, large and small, for everyone on stage, and yet the characters, and the play itself, search for little moments of meaning and connection.
The sad history of radioactive relationships must, by definition, begin with Marie Curie, the woman who coined the term “radioactivity.” In 1911 the widowed madame had an affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of her late husband. The ensuing scandal, which was uncovered concurrently with the awarding of her second Nobel Prize, nearly cost her her reputation. And while this heated dalliance drives the story in Lauren Gunderson’s instructive new work, The Half-Life of Marie Curie, it is framed by another of Curie’s relationships, the platonic friendship she shared with the electrical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton.
Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, a new play by Liza Birkenmeier, is an intriguing slice of life set on a St. Louis rooftop on Friday, June 23, 1983, the night before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. If younger members of today’s LGBTQ community often take for granted the plight of their elders, Birkenmeier’s play bravely imagines what it was like when being gay involved claustrophobic secrets, blind struggle and a stepping into the void to create a reality without social or cultural precedence.
Like The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels, Richard Nelson’s new play, The Michaels, focuses on a family in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a destination that has become for this playwright what Idaho is for the dramatist Samuel D. Hunter. In Rhinebeck, Nelson finds a microcosm of American life, although his primary structural models are clearly the plays of Anton Chekhov. Nelson has had a hand in translating three plays by the Russian master, and Chekhov’s influence is evident in the quotidian concerns of the earlier families as well as this one: it’s the first in a third cycle.
In One Discordant Violin, the music and narration are central to the story, sometimes complimenting each other and at other times riffing on one another. Adapted by Yann Martel (Life of Pi) from his own short story, the play follows the adventure of a single narrator whose journey provokes a meditation on the meaning of life, the Vietnam War, Trump, the real estate mogul, Joseph Conrad’s stories and fastidious use of punctuation, and the lost dreams of youth.
The setting of BrandoCapote, the multimedia performance piece currently playing at the Tank, is a room at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. It is the location in which Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando in 1957 when the star was filming Sayonara. The play hopscotches from 1957 to 2004, the year Brando died, and the hotel also represents, as the program explains, purgatory.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
Despite the title, Barbara Hammond’s futuristic drama Terra Firma is ironically on shaky ground. Having its world premiere at Baruch Performing Arts College, the play is set on an abandoned platform of a country that experience a “Big War” some 50 years earlier. There, three characters have abandoned the mainland and commandeered the site. Sporadically there are explosions on shore—the conflict is apparently not over, or is it?
Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season is being promoted as a “demented romantic comedy,” and it certainly is that—and more. After two years of development at All for One Theater, where Vieh is an artist in residence, and a recent world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Monsoon Season is a strange, funny, and haunting piece, which depicts, with wit and pathos, two lives careening out of control, and yet never takes a condescending or mocking attitude toward its characters.
Games, Henry Naylor’s play about two German athletes in the 1930s, brings to life the challenges and triumphs of Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann, star Jewish fencer and high jumper, respectively, in Nazi Germany. The play follows the women’s development from gifted child athletes through the period when Nazism clouds their futures. Both come from Jewish backgrounds, but Mayer has a non-Jewish mother. Their differing experiences after Hitler’s election and Nazism’s subsequent anti-Jewish restrictions is the meat of Naylor’s two-character play.
Matt Williams’s Fear, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, begins with Phil (Enrico Colantoni) dragging 15-year-old Jamie (Alexander Garfin) on stage in a stranglehold. “Why were you at the lake?” Phil demands, in the abandoned tool shed where he takes his prisoner (scenic design by Andrew Boyce). At its best, Fear, soundly directed by Tea Alagić, is propelled by mystery and frayed nerves, with the potential for violence looming. The confrontation is not just between Phil and Jamie, but soon Ethan (Obi Abili) stumbles upon the unusual scene—with Jamie now tied to a chair—and the story of a missing girl in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood becomes about class and cultural conflict.
Dramas about alcoholism are usually dour and lugubrious, like the films Days of Wine and Roses or The Lost Weekend. It’s a surprise, therefore, to find playwright Sean Daniels has taken a leaf from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in—quick cuts, actors switching roles expeditiously with the help of a costume elementa, wry humor—to deliver what turns out to be, in the end, a story that can’t escape the sadness and seriousness of the ruin alcoholism can wreak. In spite of the grim story, the journey feels different and fresh.
Tennessee Williams’s 1945 breakout play, The Glass Menagerie, takes place in “memory,” as the brooding narrator/protagonist Tom announces at the start. In Austin Pendleton and Peter Bloch’s production at the Wild Project, Tom’s memories not only haunt the character but literally haunt the entire production with an array of spooky stage effects, which lay a chill on the evening that only the playwright’s poetry can defrost.
Playwrights Horizons is currently housing an unexpected thing in New York City: conservatives openly discussing their beliefs. And liberal New Yorkers are, and should be, flocking to it. Providing a respite from the shock-jock conservatism of Donald Trump and Fox News, Will Arbery’s new play Heroes of the Fourth Turning puts Catholic conservatism onstage in all of its messiness and nuance, daring its audience to listen to what the other side has to say—and maybe even making them care about the characters doing the talking.
If Jack Kerouac was the epitome of 1950s beat culture, road-tripping his way across America, then the photographer W. Eugene Smith might just have been his stationary counterpart, discovering jazz, drugs, and artistry in the squalid comfort of his own home. Jaymes Jorsling, in his ambitious and at times stunning new play, (A)loft Modulation, unleashes Smith’s story from linear time, changes the names to poeticize the innocent, and blasts it full of jazz, all the while exploring what it means to be an American, and what it means, simply, to be.
Runboyrun and In Old Age, by Mfoniso Udofia, a master at wordplay, capture the power of letting go of the past. The two plays are part of Udofia’s nine-part cycle that focuses on several generations of Nigerian immigrants who have settled in America. In Runboyrun and In Old Age, a catharsis occurs when the truth is revealed, and characters meet this new feeling with both hope and sadness.
David Staller, the artistic director of the Gingold Group, has made his mission to celebrate the plays of George Bernard Shaw. To that end, the group offers readings of Shaw plays monthly and hosts discussions about him. One play each year receives a fully staged production. The current offering, Caesar and Cleopatra, is a rarity. Although it’s interesting, it’s less satisfying than, for instance, its low-budget Heartbreak House was last season.
