Drama

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The Winter’s Tale

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The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale poses two huge challenges to any director. One is that Leontes, the king of Sicilia who has been hosting his bosom buddy Polixenes, king of Bohemia, for nine months, suddenly and without reason suspects his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his old friend. The other is a jump in time between the first three acts—steeped in tragedy—to a fourth act of pastoral comedy, and a last act of redemption. Director Eric Tucker’s production of The Winter’s Tale for Bedlam seems to have taken its approach from the company’s title: it’s almost all bedlam.

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Chester Bailey

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Chester Bailey

Ephraim Birney, who plays the titular character in Joseph Dougherty’s Chester Bailey, mentions in his playbill bio that he “bears a striking resemblance to his co-star.” His co-star is the acclaimed theater actor Reed Birney, Ephraim’s father, and Ephraim is correct about the resemblance, not just in physical terms but also in talent: Chester Bailey showcases two fine actors in a play about trauma, delusion, and regret.

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Dodi & Diana

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Dodi & Diana

The come-hither title of Colt Coeur’s Dodi & Diana is essentially a bait-and-switch. For the most part, the characters in Kareem Fahmy’s two-hander are not the lovers whom one expects. They’re a married couple, Jason and Samira, who are well off and a bit New Age. Samira does kundalini, while Jason sees an astrologer, Vincent, who has told him that he and Samira are “astrological doubles” for Diana Spencer and her Muslim boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. Happily, Fahmy’s tricksy title masks a play that’s interesting and well-performed.

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Hedda Gabler

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Hedda Gabler

Just in time for Halloween, the Off-Off-Broadway troupe Bedlam is spicing up its presentation of Hedda Gabler with a Walpurgisnacht dance. That unexpected choreographic interpolation, with flashing lights, thump-y music, and Hellfire Club costumes, might strike the fancy of Sigmund Freud but would certainly surprise the play’s author, Henrik Ibsen—and perhaps also Jon Robin Baitz, whose adaptation, based on Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey’s translation, the production utilizes.

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Peerless

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Peerless

This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.

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Powerhouse

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Powerhouse

Feminists will undoubtedly rejoice at David Harms’s new play, Powerhouse, and its central character, a passionate and fearless lawyer in her prime who unapologetically speaks truth to power. Briskly directed by Ken Wolf, Powerhouse takes the complex subject of fraternization among coworkers out of the shadows and brings it into the daylight.

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The Sea Lady

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The Sea Lady

In 1930, the theater artist Neith Boyce was commissioned to adapt H. G. Wells’s 1901 fantasy novel The Sea Lady for the stage. After five years of work, and with a Broadway production planned, Wells’s agent rescinded the rights to the novel, and the play was never seen. For decades the manuscript resided at Yale’s Beinecke Library, until Boyce’s biographer sent it to the Metropolitan Playhouse, which is currently staging the play’s world premiere under the direction (and design) of the company’s artistic director, Alex Roe.

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As You Like It

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As You Like It

Maybe it’s the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the subsequent House Committee hearings this past summer, but the idea of fleeing to the Forest of Arden has rarely been so enticing. Directors often reinvent it as a rowdy retreat, replete with music and dance, but in Lynnea Benson’s production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Arden is mellow, soft, and dappled in sylvan light (created by Dennis Parichy).

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I’m Revolting

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I’m Revolting

Hospital waiting rooms are queasy yet strangely intimate spaces that have a way of whittling away pretense and revealing a person’s true self. Relationships with strangers can feel significant. Sensitive information about bodies is routinely, almost blithely, discussed. Gracie Gardner makes use of this fraught setting in I’m Revolting, which takes place in the waiting area of a skin-cancer clinic in New York City in 2019. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the play has flashes of excellence but never fully coheres or figures out what story, exactly, it is telling.

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Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

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Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge

On Feb. 18, 1965, author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale) debated whether “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in England. The debate generated excitement and interest at the time—as described by historian Kevin Schultz, more than 700 (white) students showed up, and filled the room to overflowing. The face-off, reenacted in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, has since become legendary, the subject of books and documentaries, in particular because of Baldwin’s brilliant dissection of race in America, which continues to be painfully relevant today.

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Our Man in Santiago

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Our Man in Santiago

If you like political satire with a twist of espionage, look no further than Mark Wilding’s new play, Our Man in Santiago. Directed by Charlie Mount, this comic spy thriller, inspired by the failed U.S. attempt in the 1970s to depose Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected left-wing leader, can reawaken one to the spectacular misfires of American adventurism.

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This Beautiful Future

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This Beautiful Future

A woman walks over to a large flat-screen TV and, using the remote control, selects a karaoke track. Believe it or not, this is the start of a play set in occupied France in 1944: This Beautiful Future, directed by Jack Serio. That woman and her male counterpart—theater vets Angelina Fiordellisi and Austin Pendleton as characters named Angelina and Austin—are on stage for the entire 80-minute running time, but the story really centers on two teenagers: Otto, a German soldier stationed in Chartres in the summer of ’44, and Elodie, a local girl. They’re both painfully naive. She thinks her Jewish neighbors will eventually come home; he’s psyched to march into England and anticipates a quick British surrender.

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Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

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Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

David Strathairn, whose stellar career as a character actor has spanned decades, gives a brilliant, riveting solo performance in Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. Playing a Pole who experienced the Holocaust, he draws on historical evidence and the testimony that playwrights Clark Young and Derek Goldman employ in their portrait of a righteous and desperate man determined to prevent the annihilation of his country’s Jews. This is the real-life Karski, humble, modest, and painfully aware of what he could do, and more so of what he could not do, to save them.

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Jasper

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Jasper

It is perhaps sign of these pandemic times that several Off-Broadway plays opening in the coming weeks all deal with severe illness. Manhattan Theater Club will stage Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, featuring a character with cerebral palsy. At the Atlantic, Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting is set in a skin-cancer clinic, and next month the Roundabout offers a work by Noah Diaz with the on-the-nose title, You Will Get Sick. But first, the Yonder Window Theatre Company gives us Jasper, a thought-provoking drama in which a boy with a fatal illness tests the limits of his caring parents.

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Strings Attached

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Strings Attached

Early in Carol Buggé’s new comedy-drama, Strings Attached, one of the author’s characters name-checks British writer Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, about an actual 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Danish capital. Buggé’s reference is a two-edged sword: her own work doesn’t come close to Frayn’s, but it does indicate that she has a passion and knowledge of physics that she wants to share with audiences. Frayn’s treatment is a rare instance of making science dramatically interesting, but Buggé’s overstuffed play is less viable.

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Macbitches

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Macbitches

Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches is proof positive that some of the most exhilarating theater in New York City is being staged in Off-Off-Broadway houses. McIntosh’s 85-minute piece dramatizes what happens when Hailey (Marie Dinolan), a freshman acting major, is unexpectedly cast in the plum role of Lady Macbeth, and Rachel (Caroline Orlando), the queen bee of a college theater department in Minnesota, is left with big bruises on her ego.

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On That Day in Amsterdam

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On That Day in Amsterdam

On That Day in Amsterdam begins on a morning in 2015, after two young men have hooked up at a dance club in the Dutch metropolis. One of them, Kevin (Glenn Morizio), an American of Filipino extraction, is impatient to depart: he has a flight back to America later in the day, and he feels no emotional connection. The other, Sammy (Ahmad Maksoud), hopes to know Kevin better and nudges him to have breakfast. A heavy snow delays Kevin’s trip, and what ensues in Clarence Coo’s emotionally reverberating play expands to far more than a gay love story: it is a moving drama about life’s fleeting encounters, loss, nostalgia, home, art, and memory, told in scenes that skip through centuries.

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Under the Dragon’s Tail

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Under the Dragon’s Tail

On the lam criminals, a would-be king living as an exiled stoner, an untethered cosmonaut, and a pair of lovers sorting through the detritus of a terminated relationship—are the characters populating Isaac Byrne’s Under the Dragon’s Tail. Byrne also directs the quartet of one-acts that are not always in perfect harmony, but as a quadriptych, they intriguingly show the ways in which elements of mythology, metaphor, and symbolism can give order to the chaos of the contemporary world.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features roles that are (pardon the expression) catnip to adventurous actors. This land mine of a play premiered in 1955, a year that, in retrospect, seems the apex of Williams’s success. The playwright’s career took off with The Glass Menagerie in 1945, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, and continued for 28 years after Cat, until his death in 1983. During a long literary decline, he wrote a number of lesser, though admirable, plays, but even the best of those don’t measure up to his depiction of the Pollitts, a clan of nouveau riche Southern strivers squabbling over “twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.”

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Sex, Grift and Death

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Sex, Grift and Death

Potomac Theatre Project’s Sex, Grift and Death, an evening of one-acts by British playwrights Steven Berkoff and Caryl Churchill, captures the brutal nature of sex, financial survival, death, and illness. The lively cast uses a mixture of British and American accents that work for the sensibility of each piece.

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