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.”
Mama I’m a Big Girl Now!, the new musical entertainment at New World Stages, seems so eager to race to the exclamation point that it’s even missing a comma. The show wants to spread exuberance, excitement, and joy. It mostly succeeds.
It may be an overgeneralization, but let’s put it out there: In stage comedies, the more the cast laughs at its own purportedly hilarious exploits, the less the audience does. The onstage hollers and whoops are frequent and loud in The Z Team, Jeff and Jacob Foy’s workplace yuk-fest at Theatre Row, and while some of the audience seemed to enjoy it, those seated in E1 and E2 barely cracked a smile.
Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.
Sports, friendship and Lebron James are central to Rajiv Joseph’s play King James. The renowned basketball player, known by the epithet of the title, brings two unlikely sports fanatics together to form a long-term bond that surpasses a ball game.
Romantic relationships can be a bushel of complex emotions. In her new play, Bees & Honey, Guadalís Del Carmen explores the intricacies of a Dominican American couple living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The play begins with a segment in which its two principals talk about Juan Luis Guerra’s bachata song, “Como Abeja al Panal” (i.e., “like a bee to its honeycomb”), which inspired the title Bees & Honey. The composer Guerra, as described in the play, “is and will always be the Beethoven of Latin America.”
Jane Austen’s work has never been an easy read, but in the way she weaves her characters’ complex personalities into her novels she attempts to provide the reader a window into their early 19th-century English culture. Yet perhaps because of cultural and linguistic norms of the time, some characters are not easily accessible. Writers Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon jointly explore George Wickham in Being Mr. Wickham, giving the audience a social, parlor-like closeup—an almost intimate one—of the very man whom Austen vilifies in Pride and Prejudice.
At the outset of Orlando, playwright-performer Lucy Roslyn says she discovered Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (also titled Orlando) at a “jumble sale” when she was 12. Roslyn, from England’s West Midlands, explains that a jumble sale is what Americans call a yard sale. She also mentions that hers is a Coventry accent and that Woolf’s Orlando, in successive editions, has been a treasured companion since she bought that flea-market paperback years ago.
Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.
The National Asian American Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet may just go down as the season’s most misdirected production. Employing Hansol Jung’s modern-verse adaptation as its text, codirectors Jung and Dustin Wills no doubt intended to revamp Shakespeare’s tragedy by leaning into its comedy to point up the darker aspects. But what one gets is a travesty of the play.
The turmoil of refugee family life following World War II—the traumas of escaping genocide, identifying the dead, and hunting for the missing—lingers until today. Holocaust survivors have often been separated by cities, continents, political and ideological barriers, and sometimes by religion. The postwar obstacles to reassembling family units are daunting. Mark Weiner’s compelling drama Hidden confronts the pain of that separation and the feelings of abandonment, loss, anger, and confusion that persist, even when those separated are reunited.
Part ghost story, part coming-of-age drama, part memory play, Being Chaka—written by Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi and Nalini Sharma—is a provocative investigation into racism in America. The surreal plot centers on the character Chaka (Kahiem Rivera), a black 16-year-old transfer student at East Prep High School in Manhattan. As the action unfolds, the audience will see him continually shifting between reality and dreamscapes, with the line between the two worlds often blurring.
People can be damaged by those they love or admire. They can sometimes be repaired, too, with the help of others. And often the shared desire to be healed is a salve in itself. Such are the truths swirling beneath the meditation and mindfulness sessions on display in The Fears. It is a toss-up as to whether playwright Emma Sheanshang has crafted a strikingly sad comedy or a quite funny drama. The play’s seven characters all walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy. And because the action is set in a Buddhist center, they do so without their shoes.
Lucie Tiberghien, artistic director of Molière in the Park, has scored a coup—an English-language world premiere of Tartuffe that uses Moliere’s uncensored version as its basis. Tiberghien’s production is the first English rendering to draw on a restoration of the original text by Georges Forestier that played in 2022 at the Comédie Française.
The great poet W. H. Auden had notable success working on the stage—he collaborated on choral works and an opera with Benjamin Britten and on plays with Christopher Isherwood. But Auden as a character has had a lively theatrical life too. Paul Godfrey’s 1990 play Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens examined Britten’s friendship with Auden in the 1940s. In 2012 the Off-Broadway musical February House featured them living in Brooklyn in the early 1940s, in a house with Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers. And now comes Alan Bennett’s play The Habit of Art, written in 2009 but making its New York debut as part of Brits Off-Broadway. It shows a declining Auden meeting his old friend Britten after a 30-year estrangement.
Fiasco Theater, in a joint production with Red Bull Theater, takes on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was a flop when it premiered in 1607. Though it has been occasionally revived, the play is mostly of scholarly interest: Beaumont is best-known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as writer-in-residence of the King’s Men, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle is Beaumont’s only play written alone. If the comedy doesn’t offer up the richness or complexity of Shakespeare, Fiasco is clearly drawn to its story of topsy-turvy community-building through theater.
The impending 75th anniversary of the declaration of Israel as an independent state has prompted many controversial discussions. Among them are retrospective conversations about the country’s early days and questions as to whether those who struggled to create a cohesive post-Holocaust multicultural society also permitted systematic mistreatment of some citizens. How, for example, is it possible to justify the abduction of Yemenite children and the resultant grief and trauma for their families? Daughter of the Wicked, Shanit Keter Schwartz’s solo autobiographical play, deals in large part with her Yemenite identity, her immigrant parents, and her search for her missing sister.
As the loopy title suggests, Regretfully, So the Birds Are is theater of the absurd. Julia Izumi’s play concerns three New Jersey siblings adopted from Southeast Asia by a Caucasian couple (Gibson Frazier and the incomparable Kristine Nielsen) who’ve refused to tell the children where they were born. The parents’ rationale is that, if their adoptive offspring don’t know where they come from, they’ll feel their “origins are the Whistler family” rather than separate, far-off countries.
It’s amazing how Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and her first cousin Eleanor, renowned wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), sustained a relationship for more than six decades, given their polar-opposite dispositions. Blood is not necessarily thicker than water, and yet these two disparate personalities—the former, a socialite and senator’s wife, and the other, a political force and humanitarian in her own right, do not sever ties. Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts, Ellen Abrams’s new play about that relationship, deals with these celebrated women’s close camaraderie from childhood through FDR’s death.
Lauren Gunderson is the most successful playwright you’ve never heard of—if you are a New York theatergoer. She has topped American Theatre magazine’s annual list of most-produced playwrights in three of the last five years and ranked second in the other two, but her work is mostly done by regional theaters. Gunderson’s Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight, for example, has been staged from Maryland to Wisconsin to New Mexico to Australia since it premiered at California’s South Coast Rep in 2009, but is just now arriving Off-Broadway.
The opening scene of Act II of Smart is not a typical meet-cute. One person is grieving the recent death of her father and looking at an apartment she can’t afford. The other is the broker, who in her downtime has an even more difficult job of caring for a mother with dementia. Still, “meet-cute” seems a good description because the actors, well, they are cute, and they act cute as their conversation veers away from real estate and they discover what they have in common.
Día y Noche is a dynamic, energy-filled new play by David Anzuelo that chronicles the lives of two teenage boys, Danny Guerrero and Martin Leonard Brown, growing up in El Paso, Texas, during the 1980s. Danny (Freddy Acevedo) and Martin (Neil Tyrone Pritchard) are polar opposites, yet their friendship is one of the best relationships they could have imagined.
Liliana Padilla’s new play How to Defend Yourself tells the story of college students attempting to make sense of relationships, sexuality, and consent. Co-directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin, and Steph Paul, the drama unfolds in a college gym where a group of women are meeting for a self-defense class. The class is the brainchild of Brandi (Talia Ryder) and Kara (Sarah Marie Rodriguez) after the violent sexual assault of a fellow classmate, Susannah, on campus. Brandi and Kara are in Susannah’s sorority, and they’ve decided to do more than just talk about the incident. “It’s so easy to do nothing. Right?” Brandi says. “We wanted to do something.”
The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.
