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.
With TV star Marcia Cross and beloved stage actor Bryan Batt in the cast, two Tony winners on the design team, and recognizable names among the producers, Pay the Writer would appear to be a solidly financed production. Yet it has a kind of low-rent look to it and clunky staging.
Going to a solo show that is set up as a memorial service might not sound like a particularly inviting theatrical experience during the dog days of summer. But A Eulogy for Roman, written and performed by the beguiling Brendan George, proves that saying farewell to a childhood friend doesn’t have to be an occasion for tears but can be a time for making new promises.
For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life.
Director Jack Serio’s intimate staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had a brief run in July at a private loft in the Flatiron District (16 nights, with 40 spectators per night), and has now returned for a few weeks at a different loft in the same neighborhood. The original run cultivated a buzz of exclusivity—“sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it,” as described in the New Yorker. The impression that you have been granted entrée to an event persists in the encore engagement: the program given to the relatively few (but more than 40) audience members includes a countdown of how many performances remain.
The Second Stage production of Toros deserves a prominent spot in New York theater annals thanks to Frank Wood’s tenderly compelling portrayal of Tica, a golden retriever on her last legs. Danny Tejera’s sometimes comedic drama is a largely slice-of-life depiction of three privileged, emotionally stunted millennials living in Spain after the election of President Donald J. Trump and just before the onslaught of COVID-19. Tica—loyal, empathetic, and loving—is a foil to the humans rather than the play’s focus. Wood’s impeccable performance is calibrated to avoid upstaging the other actors, yet his Tica is the most memorable aspect of this arresting, if sometimes unsatisfying, play.
Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic revenge fantasy about a basketball superstar who was born as a consequence of Zeus’s raping of a mortal woman. This multilayered piece uses poetry, music, and a mix of Greek and Yoruba mythology for a lyrical meditation on power, patriarchy, and the black feminist response to the #MeToo movement.
“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.
Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending is a play not frequently revived. Although it has many of the themes and elements of the major works, its premiere in 1957, directed by critic Harold Clurman rather than Elia Kazan, was short-lived. The production at Theatre for a New Audience throws into relief some of the problems. As interesting as the play may be for fans of Williams, one comes away with a sense of dissatisfaction. Williams described its theme as “more tolerance and respect for the wild and lyric impulses that the human heart feels and so often is forced to repress, in order to avoid social censure and worse.” Variety, however, judged it “a murky tale of inbred, hard-eyed people in a Mississippi village.”
Watching Flex, you may be reminded of The Wolves, the pre-pandemic Off-Broadway hit about a girls’ soccer team. Your mind may flash to TV shows about Black female friends, like Living Single or Insecure. One scene might make you think of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the 2020 indie film in which a girl travels with her friend for an abortion. The new play also brings to mind any number of dramas—on stage or screen—with a protagonist who’s determined to escape a dead-end hometown, or all those sports stories where everything’s building up to the Big Game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
