Reviews

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Lonesome Blues

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Lonesome Blues

“Lonesome Blues,” a new musical at the York, is a historical dramatization of the life of Blind Lemon Jefferson through music. Jefferson was an itinerant Texas bluesman who was one of the first to be recorded by Paramount Records in the 1920s. He is said to have influenced everyone from Leadbelly to Bob Dylan to the Beatles. Jefferson went on to record 80 songs until his untimely death in his early 30s. He was found frozen near the river in Chicago. The blues, as does the play, tells the story of this rough life for African-Americans in America in the early 20th century. “Blues hits a nerve and that hurts” Jefferson declares.

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Little Rock

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Little Rock

Little Rock, Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s docudrama about the nine African American students who integrated a white high school in the Arkansas capital in 1957, seems especially relevant now. Near the end of the play, an actor assuming the persona of television news reporter Mike Wallace says, “It’s astonishing what the Nine from Little Rock have taught us as a people—that even children can, in a gentle way, shake the world for better.” It remains an important lesson today as schools face new and presumably insurmountable challenges. Indeed, as the inspirational and courageously outspoken Parkland, Fla., shooting survivors continue to demonstrate, adults can learn a great deal about social change and agitation from the youth.

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The Fourth Wall

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A.R. Gurney, who died in June 2017, was prolific to the end. Like Verdi, Henry James, and Philip Roth (a recently deceased contemporary of Gurney’s), this urbane playwright exercised robust creative powers far beyond customary retirement age. Judging by the number of high-profile revivals since his death (most notably last season’s superb Off-Broadway production of Later Life), Gurney’s wit and insight are still integral to American drama.

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Scissoring

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Scissoring takes place in present-day New Orleans, and even though several ghostly spirits make appearances in Christina Quintana’s thoughtful new one-act, it is modern Catholicism and not voodoo that haunts the play’s protagonist, Abigail Bauer. Free of any Southern stereotypes, the work has a sensibility that is not only post-Katrina, it is decidedly post-Blanche. Abigail might be suffering from delusions, but she has no need for brutish men nor the kindness of strangers. Instead, she is empowered by the women she knows and made strong by the tough kindness of her lover and her colleague, before gaining the wherewithal to be kind to herself.

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Exquisita Agonía

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Exquisita Agonía

Exquisita Agonía (Exquisite Agony) is a thought-provoking and entertaining new work by Nilo Cruz, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Anna in the Tropics. The unusual premise of Exquisita Agonía centers on the unsaid, the unfinished and what is known as cellular memory.

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Secret Life of Humans

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Secret Life of Humans

Like the Scottish-American songwriter with the same name, British playwright David Byrne is concerned with life during wartime, and captivated by one of life’s great questions: “Well, how did I get here?” In this coolly cerebral and beautifully staged production of Secret Life of Humans, Byrne, who codirects with Kate Stanley, transports us through the present day, the 1940s and the 1970s, with pit stops at the dawn of humanity. He explores a one-night stand, a marriage abruptly ended and, of all things, the darkly ironic and secretive career path of real-life mathematician Jacob Bronowski. As fuel for the fire, Byrne pulls big ideas from historian Yuval Harari’s bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, as well as Bronowski’s 1973 BBC series, The Ascent of Man.

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The Beast in the Jungle

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The Beast in the Jungle

Following their previous collaboration on the 2010 musical The Scottsboro Boys, director-choreographer Susan Stroman and composer John Kander have returned to the Vineyard Theatre for The Beast in the Jungle, a haunting memory play warning that the biggest danger in life is the road not taken.

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Woman and Scarecrow

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Woman and Scarecrow

Irish playwright Marina Carr attempts to capture the thoughts and sentiments of a woman during her last hours alive in Woman and Scarecrow. With skillful direction by Ciarán O’Reilly, this production delves  into the innermost feelings of a woman who is learning about the meaning of life at the last possible moment. Carr has chosen to use general character names that could represent anyone, to suggest a universality to the situation: the principals here are Woman, Scarecrow, Him, Aunty Ah and Thing.

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Devil of Choice

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Devil of Choice

Devil of Choice, Maggie Diaz Bofill’s new play presented by the LAByrinth Theater Company, begins with a violinist silhouetted amidst a scorching red light. A long, wailing note that is both sinister and filled with longing pierces the silence, and the audience is momentarily cast into the fiery pit of hell. Fittingly, as one of the characters makes clear later, the violin is the favorite musical instrument of the devil. This striking image sets the scene, however, for the disappointing drama that follows, a Faustian riff on an all-too familiar love triangle.

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The Hollower

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Liza Birkenmeier’s The Hollower is the kind of play that tries to push the envelope in a variety of ways but ends up as effective as a pile of shredded paper. Perhaps that may be viewed as a tortured metaphor, but it’s nothing compared to the torturous path of what passes for plot in The Hollower. If you find yourself adrift after five minutes, you’ll be in full consternation when you leave.

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Peace for Mary Frances

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Peace for Mary Frances

Peace for Mary Frances marks a promising debut for dramatist Lily Thorne. The play, produced by the New Group, follows the last weeks of the 90-year-old title character and her typically (well, maybe not so typically) dysfunctional family. The daughter of refugees from the Armenian genocide, Mary Frances is plagued by physical maladies. She has decided to resolve some old family issues and then shuffle off this you-know-what at home.

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Maple & Vine

Maple & Vine

Nostalgia is a potent drug. The lure of a “simpler time” can inspire longing, sadness and even a radical lifestyle change. Now onstage at the Flea Theater in a thoughtful, accessible production by New York Deaf Theatre, Jordan Harrison’s Maple & Vine looks past the chaotic world of 21st-century technology to offer a view of the politics and realities of returning to the past.

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Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

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Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire has lived many lives since Caryl Churchill wrote it 42 years ago. The piece’s ambition is grand, but its scope is intimate, allowing for immense freedom of interpretation. Director Rachel Chavkin’s revival at New York Theatre Workshop focuses on its chamber roots as an ensemble piece for six actors.

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Operation Crucible

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Operation Crucible

“Bang.” “Bang.” “Turn.” “Brush.” Apparently that’s how steel gets made, or got made in World War II, with two men pounding it, one positioning it, and one more readying it for the next step. And a lot of steel gets made in Operation Crucible, Kieran Knowles’s vigorous retelling of the Sheffield Blitz, a 1940 calamity in the South Yorkshire town. Part-documentary, part-character study, and all-teamwork, this four-man entry into 59E59’s Brits Off Broadway series is energetic and affecting, and a little disorganized.

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Long Day’s Journey Into Night

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Long Day’s Journey Into Night

It’s a truism that Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is long and repetitious, so it comes as a surprise that Richard Eyre’s production plays so grippingly that it's never a slog. Eyre makes it clear that the Tyrones, the family at its center (based O’Neill’s own), are deeply dysfunctional, but each repetition at the BAM Harvey Theater rings true, and many of them prove comical. Each character knows the others’ strengths and frailties. Yet although they claw at one another often, there’s pulsing love in this family.

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The Gentleman Caller

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The Gentleman Caller

The Gentleman Caller combines kernels of fact with lots of fancy. In this two-character play, Chicago dramatist Philip Dawkins imagines the early friendship of Tennessee Williams (1911–83) and William Inge (1913–73). Beginning as a rowdy pastiche of sex comedies popular on Broadway when Inge and Williams were active there, the play turns darker in a handful of well-written monologues that are highly engaging but don’t add up to a convincing portrait of either character.

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Molasses in January

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The ranks of triple-threat musical theater writers—individuals responsible for book, music, and lyrics—are small. Michael John LaChiusa springs to mind, and Lionel Bart (Oliver!), Frank Loesser (The Most Happy Fella), and Sandy Wilson (The Boy Friend), but just try to think of others. Add to this exclusive club Francine Pellegrino, whose Molasses in January is premiering at the Theater Center. It’s an original book, based only on history—that of Boston’s molasses disaster of 1919, when a tank burst and sent syrup cascading through the streets, killing 21. Pellegrino is not overly experienced in any of these three skills, and she proves to be way better at one of them than the other two.

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Alternating Currents

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A production of Working Theater, Alternating Currents is part historical pageant play, part romantic drama, and part social commentary. As part of the company’s Five Boroughs/One City initiative, Adam Kraar’s play, directed by Kareem Fahmy, evolved from interviews with residents of Queens as part of the company’s mission “to create theater for and about working people.” Currents is set in the present at Electchester, an actual complex of 38 buildings in Flushing. But Electchester’s best days were around its founding by Harry Van Arsdale, a benevolent overlord who walked the grounds following construction in 1949.

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Danger Signals

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Danger Signals

Built for Collapse’s Danger Signals, written by Jen Goma and directed by Sanaz Ghajar, flips back and forth between 2018, 1935 and 1847 to explore “lobotomies, traumatic brain injuries and western culture’s desire to control and colonize,” according to the promotional material for this strange, difficult piece.

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Summer and Smoke

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Summer and Smoke

Classic Stage Company and Transport Group are taking a fresh look at Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Critical estimation of this lyrical drama—the playwright's fourth Broadway outing—has fluctuated since its 1948 premiere. After the original New York presentation, Summer and Smoke seemed destined for obscurity. But Jose Quintero’s 1952 production for Circle in the Square was a triumph and, according to many commentators, marked the birth of Off-Broadway. The current revival, under sure-handed direction by Jack Cummings III, discards the realistic trappings of mid-20th-century American theater and features a nearly ideal cast.

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