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.
In the 1950s Paddy Chayefsky wrote a successful drama, Middle of the Night, in which nobody could understand what a young Gena Rowlands could see in an old Edward G. Robinson. Or, in the movie version, what Kim Novak could see in Fredric March. That quandary is back, after a fashion, with Mr. Parker, Michael McKeever’s sort-of-new drama (it premiered in Florida in 2018). Only this time it’s hard to see what Davi Santos sees in Derek Smith.
Can an atheist serve as a guide to the history, customs, and longevity of the Jewish religion and its adherents? Moreover, how can an atheist recognize that a man who has just died is with God? At first glance, this seems quite absurd. Yet neither for Michael Takiff nor for his audience does it appear to be a problem. Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order), Takiff’s one-man show, is a roller-coaster ride through Jewish belief, identity, and practice.
It seems to never be a bad time to stage Chekhov’s Three Sisters: timeless and timely, funny and devastating, remarkably in tune with the currents of real life, and providing material for great actors to explore memorable and fully rounded characters.
In the 1840s, famine devastated Ireland, and approximately 1 million people died during the period known as the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór in Irish). Another 2 million emigrated from the comparatively small island nation, and as a result, by 1852, the country had lost approximately 25 percent of its total population. Jaki McCarrick’s Belfast Girls, currently running at Irish Repertory Theatre, examines the effect the famine had on women in particular and explores its devastating impact on the poorest of the poor in Ireland.
Time and again, stories about what the future holds for technology and humanity have enthralled audiences—think of the rabid followings for The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, produced 50 years apart. Playwright Karen Hartman puts forth her contribution to the genre with New Golden Age. But whereas those TV shows grabbed viewers with suspense, plot twists and amusing allegory, New Golden Age mainly offers talking. More than three-quarters of its run time is occupied by one long scene, and it consists mostly of people standing around talking. That tedium outweighs any emotional reaction that Hartman’s Facebook-run-amok scenario may elicit.
If Antonio (Tony) Valdivinos, the hero of the new musical ¡Americano!, had been born before the millennium, and especially before World War II, the chances his true story would reaching a wide audience would have been slim to none—and even less likely echoed in an Off-Broadway musical with the momentum of a Broadway hit. But ¡Americano! is a vehicle that delivers the messages behind Tony’s story and those of other “dreamers” and serves as a catalyst for activism. Under the direction of Michael Barnard, the production reflects the uncertainty and frustrations facing dreamers, particularly those desiring to serve their new homeland as true Americans.
Anyone who has walked by a Broadway theater’s stage door after a show will immediately recognize the central characters of Ana Nogueira’s Which Way to the Stage. They are the ones clutching a copy of Playbill (usually protected in plastic) in one hand and waving a Sharpie in the other. As they wait for autographs, they fervently debate the most pressing issues of the day, such as who should play Mame in the next Broadway revival; which Glinda in Wicked even comes close to Kristin Chenoweth’s performance; and, for heaven’s sake, will Rob Marshall ever make Follies into a movie?
Despite family secrets being revealed, two brushes with death, a constantly rotating set and repeated storming out of the house, not all that much happens in Our Brother’s Son, a passable but toothless drama by career gastroenterologist turned first-time playwright Charles Gluck.
Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.
Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.
Wallace Demarriá’s play Colorblind, about the leader of a Black empowerment movement, debuted in Los Angeles in 2013 and is just now having its New York premiere. During the time between the two productions, George Floyd’s murder and Donald Trump’s embrace of white nationalists have altered the conversation around racial issues in the United States. The only apparent tweak to the play, though, is a prologue in which Clinton Muhammad, a supposedly controversial activist, makes a speech claiming that Trump was elected because Americans freaked out over having a Black president.
When Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac opened in 1897, it was hailed not only for its poetry but for its elaborate sets—one for each of the five acts, from bakery to battlefield—and for its poetry and grandiose passions. Martin Crimp’s version of the story of unrequited love, produced and directed by Jamie Lloyd at BAM, has only the faintest glimmers of any exaltation. More often it’s simply disappointing.
Alfred Hitchcock famously described the basis of suspense as a situation in which there is a ticking time bomb under a table. The audience knows it is only a matter of minutes in which the bomb will explode, and they sit on the edge of their seats in anticipation of the outcome. Applying this principle, Marco Antonio Rodriguez initially establishes a veritable minefield in his new play Bloom, currently running at the IATI Theater. In the totalitarian world in which the play is set, a mother has been ordered to kill her son, and if she does not do so within precisely one hour, unimaginable horrors will follow.
Richard Chang mixes history and fiction in Citizen Wong to tell the story of Wong Chin Foo, the nineteenth-century Chinese-American journalist, activist, performer, and lecturer who fought for equal rights for Chinese-Americans and to dispel pernicious, racist stereotypes about Chinese people and culture. Presented by Pan Asian Repertory, Citizen Wong is co-directed by Ernest Abuba and Chongren Fan and features a cast of six, with the actors playing multiple characters, including historical personages or those inspired by such. The work is ambitious and timely, explicitly drawing connections to the present-day rise in anti-Asian bigotry.
SuperHero began performances the day after a gunman opened fire aboard a rush-hour Brooklyn subway train, giving added resonance to its protagonist’s decision to eschew violence as a response to personal turmoil. The playwriting debut of actor Ian Eaton, SuperHero is an autobiographical coming-of-age story about an awkward, overweight boy growing up in the Harlem projects in the 1980s.
In his new comedy-drama To My Girls, playwright JC Lee adds to a subgenre of plays about gay gatherings in which groups of friends thrash out problems and settle old scores with comic bitchiness. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is the forerunner of them all; later touchstones include Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg, Chuck Ranberg’s End of the World Party and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! Lee’s To My Girls, under the direction of Stephen Brackett, is a respectable entry, reflecting a sea change in racial politics and behavior.
A teenage, runaway heroin addict with daddy issues and a former graffiti artist long past his glory days explore the borders of friendship and codependency in Larry & Lucy, a gritty little slice-of-life one-act spinning its wheels on the intimate basement stage at Theater for the New City. Playwright Peter Welch propels his title characters forward through a whirlwind couple of days in and out of Los Angeles while simultaneously pulling them back to their unhappy pasts via brief flashbacks woven throughout the piece. If the duo’s actions are at best unusual, and at worst highly unlikely or confusing, the offbeat performances and noir atmosphere conjured up by director Joe John Batista make for a trippy ride to the West Coast.
Written in 1942, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet was intended to be the first of multiple plays about the Irish experience in America. O’Neill’s cycle was never completed, and the play was produced posthumously, in 1958. The Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival, masterfully directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, is a gut-wrenching drama that focuses on the Irish American Melody clan in the Boston of 1828. Led by Con (for Cornelius) Melody (Robert Cuccioli), a ne’er-do-well immigrant and inn owner who recites Lord Byron’s poetry, most of the characters live in a world full of delusions.
Hope blooms even in the darkest and cruelest of times in Heartland, by Gabriel Jason Dean. The story pairs two unlikely geographical places: Omaha, Nebraska, and Afghanistan. Geetee (Mari Vial-Golden), is an Afghani orphan who was displaced by war and adopted by Harold (Mark Cuddy), an Afghani scholar who teaches at the University of Nebraska. She returns to her homeland as an adult to teach at Blue Sky, a school for girls. There she meets Nazrullah (Naz, for short), a math teacher at the school.
Insights into Cambodian identity and immigrant experiences are the strongest thread running through What You Are Now, Sam Chanse’s drama at Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in which a young neuroscientist sees new research on trauma-related memory as a way to finally heal her mother, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1970s Cambodia.
