Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
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.”
Near the opening of Hyprov: Improv Under Hypnosis, Colin Mochrie refers to himself as “international comic icon,” but if you haven’t ever seen What’s My Line, Anyway? you might be skeptical of his sweeping claim. (Mochrie’s wry delivery suggests that the description is a bit of a spoof.) Nevertheless, the Canadian native is definitely the funnier half of Hyprov, which combines two disciplines into something unusual and raucously entertaining.
Katsura Sunshine’s Rakugo is a fresh and funny solo show in which the director and star, Katsura Sunshine, spins yarns with entrancing charm in the ancient Japanese comic storytelling tradition known as rakugo. It is a pleasure to come across a piece that deals, wittily and delightfully, with a little-known dramatic art form.
After squandering her inheritance as an expatriate in Paris, Lyubov Ranevskaya, protagonist of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, comes home to Russia to discover that the old order, so favorable to the haute bourgeoisie, has been scrambled by burgeoning social mobility. Unable to meet the carrying charges on the family estate, Ranevskaya (Jessica Hecht) and her brother Gaev (Mark Nelson) dither rather than addressing the double whammy of altered personal circumstances and a transformed national culture.
At its core, Donja R. Love’s powerful drama Soft has a certain familiarity. It is a variation on The Blackboard Jungle or Up the Down Staircase—but with a more ruthless, 21st-century demeanor. Its teenage characters have moved beyond the troubled inner city to incarceration, and their mentor has a darker past than either Glenn Ford or Sandy Dennis’s characters, respectively, in those films. In this facility, students wear prison jump suits and are part of a correctional program designed to save them from a criminal career—or is it?
Can an atheist serve as a guide to the history, customs, and longevity of the Jewish religion and its adherents? Moreover, how can an atheist recognize that a man who has just died is with God? At first glance, this seems quite absurd. Yet neither for Michael Takiff nor for his audience does it appear to be a problem. Jews, God, and History (Not Necessarily in That Order), Takiff’s one-man show, is a roller-coaster ride through Jewish belief, identity, and practice.
Time and again, stories about what the future holds for technology and humanity have enthralled audiences—think of the rabid followings for The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, produced 50 years apart. Playwright Karen Hartman puts forth her contribution to the genre with New Golden Age. But whereas those TV shows grabbed viewers with suspense, plot twists and amusing allegory, New Golden Age mainly offers talking. More than three-quarters of its run time is occupied by one long scene, and it consists mostly of people standing around talking. That tedium outweighs any emotional reaction that Hartman’s Facebook-run-amok scenario may elicit.
Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian’s new music-theater piece, was supposed to open on March 30, 2020. Two weeks before that, New York City’s playhouses closed precipitately in response to Covid-19. On the second anniversary of the aborted premiere, Oratorio has returned. After 24 months of isolation and loss, there’s a miraculous feel to this piece of theater.
It seems a near-impossible task to take on an historical, highly politicized, and contentious international topic, and successfully morph it into a high-tech, semi-satirical pop-rock musical. Nevertheless, with Space Dogs, playwrights-composers-lyricists Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire have done exactly that. They have etched out the broader landscape of what was perhaps the most frightening, longest-running, and potentially deadliest conflict of the late 20th century—the Cold War.
You may remember Soho Playhouse before the pandemic. Located in an antebellum row house just off Sixth Avenue, it often featured solo and Fringe Festival plays in its careworn mainstage theater or cabaret downstairs, its stairwell adorned with framed posters of shows that had played there.
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a world traveler—not by choice, but by conviction. His larger-than-life, highly controversial career caused him to flee Nazism and take refuge in several countries before he was granted permission to settle in the United States. The Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB) production of Brecht on Brecht tracks the playwright’s odyssey using his songs and writings, which include The Threepenny Opera, The Life of Galileo, and Mother Courage and Her Children.
Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec explores the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the immensely talented 19th-century French painter and printmaker, using the sidewalks, doorways, and windows of Greenwich Village as the setting for a “pandemic-friendly theatrical experience.” Live performance, puppetry, music and a short black-and-white film combine to help the site-specific production tell the story of the artist who captured the seamier side of the Belle Époque.
The work of Austin McCormick, the polymath artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV, may be handily classified as burlesque—costumer Zane Pihlstrom provides more than enough feathers, fringes, and pasties to justify it—but that label doesn’t really fit a production that incorporates dance, opera, pop music, and acrobatics as well. All are on display in his newest effort, Seven Sins.
When writer Rex Pickett was trying to get his novel Sideways published, he submitted it to film studios as well as book publishers. He has now adapted the novel as a play, but the story’s cinematic nature works against it on stage. Because there are so many scene changes, scenery is simplified to tables and chairs (and the occasional counter or bed) that can be hastily reconfigured to represent various homes, bars, restaurants and outdoor locales. But Sideways has such a strong sense of place—the Oscar-winning 2004 movie fueled a tourism boom for California’s Santa Ynez Valley, and a map of film locations is still available on the Santa Barbara visitors bureau website—that it’s shortchanged by many scenes looking similar and the same backdrop, a lone tree, remaining for the entire play. What scenic designer David L. Arsenault has created is okay (the multiple levels and a faux hot tub work well); it’s just not enough to evoke the landscapes and idea of traveling.
Assemble is an immersive theater experience that includes secret locations, apps, audio tours and choosing various paths for each member of its audience to pursue a unique adventure. The journey begins when the rendezvous point is sent to ticket buyers the day before the performance. Some technological know-how is required, too, since audience members must download a custom-made app to their cell phones, listen through earbuds, and record actions they have performed during the show. At the check-in, a code is given to participants to enter into their phones. From there, the performance begins, and viewers are off to the clandestine space—a box store big enough to accommodate shifting locales—in Brooklyn.
Novenas for a Lost Hospital is a memory play told through several narrators that celebrates St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic charitable hospital in the West Village that was founded in 1849 and closed in 2010. The novenas (devotional prayers in Catholicism), of which there are nine, give structure to the elegant sections that move back and forth in time from the founding to the closing. The effect is part drama, part history lesson, and part activism/immersive theater.
The title question of Poseidon Theatre Company’s immersive/interactive production Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe? The Cooping Theory 1969 is probably not one most people have asked themselves, even if they were aware that the great author had died mysteriously in 1849. Even less likely to be known is the second phrase in the title: “the cooping theory.”
Mac Wellman is a grand master of absurdity, and the Flea Theater is currently presenting a festival of five plays in rotating repertory. Two of them, Bad Penny and Serenity Forever, are classic examples of Wellman’s work, which often weaves together an exploration of the everyday with mythology, the metaphysical, and American consciousness.
Food might not be the primary theme one would look for in Shakespeare, but Food of Love and Third Rail Projects have hit upon it, with pleasantly surprising results, in Midsummer: A Banquet at Café Fae, an unusual performance venue just south of Union Square. From the title it’s easy to guess that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the production; it’s not easy to predict the rest.
Although the Parisian cabaret the Moulin Rouge was most recently popularized by Baz Luhrmann’s fantastical 2001 film musical, it was French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters that brought fame to the venue during its original heyday in the late 19th century. Colorful and grotesque, his works depicted the excess, revelry, and bohemian lifestyles that defined the neighborhood of Montmartre at that time. In Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec, Bated Breath Theatre Company delivers a quick and dirty look at the man behind the paintings in NoHo’s sexy, velvet-saturated bar Madame X (a venue that befits the bordello stylings of the production’s historical time period).
When actors address audiences directly, they’re said to breach the stage’s “fourth wall.” In The Mortality Machine, it’s the audience that does the breaching, penetrating all parts of the playing space and performing assigned roles side-by-side with the professionals. In this two-hour drama—site-specific, immersive, and improvisatory—part of the mystery for the playgoer is who else has bought a ticket and who’s being paid to act.
