Drama

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Malvolio

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Malvolio

Betty Shamieh’s Malvolio, a joyous sequel to Twelfth Night, investigates the life of Malvolio after the events in Shakespeare’s wintry dark comedy. In the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production, 20 years have passed since Olivia’s much-abused steward (Allen Gilmore) threatened revenge on his tormentors. Back then, Malvolio was tricked into believing the Countess Olivia, his mistress, had written a love letter to him and insisting he don yellow, cross-gartered stockings to please her. Swallowing the bait, Malvolio did as the letter requested—and swiftly was incarcerated in Illyria as a lunatic. 

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The Saviour

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The Saviour

Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour is Irish Repertory Theatre’s second presentation within a year of the “world stage premiere” of a script written for online distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and now retailored for in-person performance. The previous such work, Tracy Thorne’s Jack Was Kind, was acted as a solo by the author in the Irish Rep’s tiny basement venue in autumn 2022. The Saviour is on the company’s more capacious main stage, giving it a misleading sense of heft. Directed by Louise Lowe, the production features Marie Mullen, a Tony winner for Martin McDonagh’s memorable The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Like Jack Was Kind, The Saviour is a miniature drama intensely focused on up-to-the-moment societal problems.

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Richard III

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Richard III

New York Classical Theatre (NYCT) is a small troupe presenting distinguished plays, mostly tried and true, with occasional novelties in public spaces around New York City. Stephen Burdman, the company’s founder, espouses a performance style he calls “panoramic theater,” which involves spectators following actors as they perform scenes in multiple spots.

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The Doctor

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The Doctor

Opportunities to see the British actress Juliet Stevenson on this side of the Atlantic are too rare to pass up. Robert Icke’s play The Doctor—Stevenson has the title role in this loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi—is a welcome reminder of this actress’s enormous talent. It’s unmissable for any theater lover.

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Cassie and the Lights

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Cassie and the Lights

A foster-care placement, no matter where or when, can be a difficult, even traumatic transition for all parties involved. Much can go awry, especially when children expect that their parent or parents will return for them. Alex Howarth, writer and director of Cassie and the Lights, draws the audience almost vicariously into the fantasy-filled and emotion-and-guilt-fraught world of three sisters in foster care in northern England. Their strongest, and possibly only, tool for survival is their bond with one another.

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

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Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

Richard Hellesen’s new solo show Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground resurrects the 34th President with much sound and fury. Directed by Peter Ellenstein, and with the superb John Rubinstein playing the eponymous role, this play may well overhaul that musty image of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “do-nothing” president.

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The Comeuppance

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The Comeuppance

In his new play, The Comeuppance, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins checks in with his generation of Americans nearing 40. The five principals in this world premiere are gathering for their 20th high school reunion, and Jacobs-Jenkins, 38, draws his structure from notable plays that involve excessive drinking after sundown: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Boys in the Band. In addition, those who have read Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons may recall that comeuppance figures heavily in that novel. There’s also a smidgen of The Big Chill and a larger scoop of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

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Invisible

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Invisible

Nikhil Parmar’s relentlessly kinetic solo show Invisible is an impressive hourlong workout for the actor. The words tumble out, the situations are plentiful, and he breaks the fourth wall time and again. If he had not written the piece for himself, one might regard the movement as a mistake by a novice, but Parmar intends to show what he can do, vocally and physically, and with a vengeance.

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Foxes

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Foxes

Foxes, set in a Black Caribbean community in London, is a sly and thoughtful exploration of a series of taboo subjects. Meera (Nemide May), who is from a Muslim family, tells her boyfriend Daniel (Raphel Famotibe), who is from a Caribbean Christian family, that she is pregnant. That creates a big problem: how will these two young people, from different cultural and religious backgrounds, work it out? They are also at the beginning of their young adult life, trying to determine their future. Daniel is planning on going to university, or “uni” as the Brits call it.

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Love + Science

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Love + Science

Beginning with a chance meeting, David J. Glass’s new play Love + Science traces the lives of two gay medical students amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. After a 1981 welcoming ceremony for medical students at Columbia, Jeff (Jonathan Burke) asks another student, Matt (Matt Walker), to take his picture. Soon they are revealing intimacies that suggest personal minefields: “My mother sent her best wishes,” says Matt, tentative and reserved, while the forthright Jeff announces, “I got, ‘Get out of my house, you faggot,’ when I was 17 … been on my own ever since.” Jeff also registers that Matt is a whiz kid—he’s only 20 (though he’ll be far older by the end).

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This Land Was Made

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This Land Was Made

Tori Sampson’s This Land Was Made is a steamy gumbo of history, humor, and imagination. Directed by Taylor Reynolds, it serves up a fictive account of the origins of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Although the play has some structural flaws, it invites one to ponder the issues that animated this revolutionary social organization—racist police brutality and economic injustice—and to consider how they still resonate today.

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King James

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King James

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.

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Bees & Honey

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Bees & Honey

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.”

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Being Mr. Wickham

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Being Mr. Wickham

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.

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Orlando

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Orlando

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.

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Primary Trust

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Primary Trust

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.

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Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo and Juliet

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.

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Hidden

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Hidden

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.

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Being Chaka

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Being Chaka

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. 

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The Fears

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The Fears

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.

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