Drama

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Last summer the Ruth Stage production of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre at St. Clement’s. The critical responses were uniformly mixed-to-negative, and OffOffOnline’s Charles Wright described it as a “lumbering version” of the play under Joe Rosario’s direction. Now in a “re-engagement,” as the publicity materials describe the current iteration, the production has been substantially recast, and there are a few directorial modifications. While this Cat 2.0 still lumbers, there is a noticeable improvement along with glimmers of fresh insight into the mendacious, caustic, and fiercely combative characters who populate Williams’s Mississippi Delta estate.

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The Trees

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The Trees

Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees is a quirky and ambitious new play that may please some environmentalists and Thoreau-minded folk, but many theatergoers may find it hard to warm up to this work, populated with a dozen characters, many of whom flit in and out of the play in will-o’-the-wisp fashion. Directed by Tina Satter, The Trees investigates the American dream and questions whether stability is possible in a capitalistic world.

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Conversations After Sex

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Conversations After Sex

The racy, come-hither title of Mark O’Halloran’s 70-minute work disguises a fascinating drama en déshabillé that explores the loneliness that underlies anonymous sexual encounters and a desire by participants to connect more fully than only with sex. Though the conversations follow intercourse, they reveal more about the characters’ lives up to that point than what happens afterward. Staged with simplicity and power by Tom Creed, O’Halloran’s play is thought-provoking, sad, and thoroughly engaging.

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The Best We Could

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The Best We Could

An hour into The Best We Could, you realize you’re not watching the play you thought you were. Emily Feldman’s new drama seemed like it was a semi-experimental staging of a cross-country drive during which a grown woman and her dad visit national parks and revisit moments in their lives. Then, all of a sudden, it’s about something very specific beyond the sightseeing, bonding and memories. And the play belongs to a particular category of stories—and that category is not road trips or family relationships or Our Town riffs.

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Black Odyssey

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Black Odyssey

In Black Odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley has undertaken an ambitious conflation of Homer’s epic poem with the history of Black people in America. In this lively, overstuffed and often bewildering fantasia, Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) struggles to find his way back to his family in Harlem after a discharge from the war in Afghanistan. He ends up homeless and then in a mental hospital, while his journey is overseen from Olympus by his allies Deus (i.e., Zeus, played by James T. Alfred) and Athena (Harriet D. Foy), and from the ocean by his enemy Paw Sidin (i.e., Poseidon), who is determined to kill him.

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Othello

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Othello

The New Place Players’ production of Othello at Casa Clara, a former foundry replete with balconies and staircases, is an unusual, site-specific staging that pulls the audience into the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Makenna Masenheimer directs the 1604 tragedy without a fourth wall, and a limited audience of 50 assures an intimate experience.

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The Seagull/Woodstock, NY

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The Seagull/Woodstock, NY

Anton Chekhov’s 1895 chestnut, The Seagull, has always been a crowd pleaser. The tale of unrequited love and petty jealousy among egomaniacal adults and self-doubting youths, sown through with treatises on the craft of writing and the purpose of theater, then capped with a dead bird and a tragic ending, has spawned eight Broadway productions over the past century. 

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Letters from Max, a ritual

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Letters from Max, a ritual

Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual, is an adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, which included letters between Ruhl and Max Ritvo, her playwriting student and, shortly thereafter, friend. Ritvo died at age 25, of a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric cancer first diagnosed when he was 16. He graduated from college while undergoing chemotherapy and surgeries, producing poetry and plays and music along the way, becoming a teacher to Ruhl as much as she was to him.

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Fall River Fishing

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Fall River Fishing

Lizzie Borden, a favorite true-crime subject since long before the genre had that name, is the inspiration behind Fall River Fishing, a new play directed by Eric Tucker and written by two of its cast members, Deb Knox and Zuzanna Szadkowski. Their double duty as playwrights and performers doesn’t fully convey just how much Knox and Szadkowski, along with their three castmates (Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson and Tony Torn), put into the show. It succeeds because of these five deeply invested performances, each actor playing two roles that require them to deliver absurdist, anachronistic dialogue and engage in physical gags like eating—and feeding each other—spaghetti with their hands, sitting on the toilet for an extended period of time and getting splattered with blood.

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Becomes a Woman

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Becomes a Woman

Becomes a Woman, Betty Smith’s sort-of warmup to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn now premiering at the Mint Theater Company, begins wonderfully. In the sheet music department of a dime store in Brooklyn, circa 1927, 19-year-old Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price)—she shares the name of the heroine of Smith’s beloved novel, though she’s quite different from the Francie in the book—is working as a song plugger, demonstrating the little-known Jerome Kern–Anne Caldwell “Left All Alone Again Blues,” to the accompaniment of piano-playing pal Florry (Pearl Rhein), while friend/co-worker/roommate Tessie (Gina Daniels) looks on. A lively setting, a swell Kern tune, a trio of sassy girlfriends gabbing about men. A first of three acts that promises a friendly nostalgia trip, in the vein of Smith’s much more famous book. Where are we headed?

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

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She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind

In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.

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The Smuggler

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The Smuggler

Ronán Noone’s The Smuggler heightens the inherent challenges of the one-person play with rhyming verse. The one-act “thriller in rhyme,” as it is subtitled, is a 9,000-word poem, but solo performer Michael Mellamphy, under the direction of Conor Bagley, clears the hurdles of the challenging form and effectively engages and entertains the audience—all while crafting cocktails and, of course, rhyming.

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A Bright New Boise

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A Bright New Boise

Samuel D. Hunter creates worlds of complexity and heartbreak in the most banal settings. A Bright New Boise, which premiered in 2010 at The Wild Project and is now making its off-Broadway debut at Signature Theatre as part of Hunter’s Premiere Residency, takes place in the windowless break room of a Hobby Lobby in Boise, Idaho. Under Oliver Butler’s skillful direction, with a strong ensemble and remarkable lead performance by Peter Mark Kendall, Hunter’s characters engage in a desperate search for meaning in ways funny, painful, and devastating.

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The Wanderers

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The Wanderers

When Katie Holmes made her New York stage debut in 2008, she was married to Tom Cruise, and paparazzi descended on Broadway for her run in the All My Sons revival. Coincidentally, one of the first things Holmes says in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is “I can’t go anywhere in public without a hassle.” Holmes portrays a beautiful, famous actress, which sounds like a good fit for her. The role is a bad fit for the play itself, however, as it does not cohere with the other story lines.

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Lucy

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Lucy

A few months ago Merriam-Webster declared gaslighting 2022’s word of the year. It’s a word with origins in the theater—inspired by the title of a 1938 play, which was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Gaslighting returns to the theater with Lucy, Erica Schmidt’s intriguing new drama in which a nanny seems to be playing mind games with the mother who hires her.

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Endgame

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Endgame

John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin starring in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic masterpiece Endgame: it’s hard to imagine a more appealing combination. Thompson is perhaps the greatest classical actor of his generation, and Irwin one of the world’s premier interpreters of Beckett, as anyone who witnessed his master class On Beckett (which, like Endgame, played at the Irish Repertory Theatre) can attest. The production, anchored in two brilliant performances and under Ciarán O’Reilly’s precise and elegantly understated direction, exceeds even lofty expectations, perfectly capturing the play’s absurd, macabre comedy without sacrificing its haunting bleakness.

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Sugar Daddy

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Sugar Daddy

Shortly after launching into his solo show Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison talks about being mugged. The thief, armed with a gun, demanded his cell phone, and Morrison resisted because it had pictures of his late lover Jonathan on it. “I know we just met,” Morrison tells his audience, “but I think we can all agree that was off-brand.” (It’s clear from the audience’s ebullience that they know perfectly well what his brand is. The mostly young crowd in fleeces and pullovers and trainers have been boisterously waiting for him, even drowning out the pre-show music.) “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” explains the comedian. “We’re not known to excel in moments of crisis.”

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.

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Memorial

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Memorial

Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.

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Asi Wind’s Inner Circle

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Asi Wind’s Inner Circle

Asi Wind’s new close-up magic show, Inner Circle, may be the perfect antidote to the midwinter blahs. Wind, a master magician, eschews tricks with traditional playing cards by using ones that hold a mirror up to his audience—patrons write their names with a red or black Sharpie on blank-faced playing cards of standard size and texture, which, once collected, become his single deck for the evening. Wind believes that by having his audience members personalize each card, it makes them one audience before the show begins.

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