This production has transferred to the Women’s Project Theater (2162 Broadway at 76th) and will run through Jan. 19. For tickets and more information, visit mrssternwanders.com.
Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.
For a while in Ken Urban’s play A Guide for the Homesick, the author’s subject seems predictable. Set in Amsterdam, near Schiphol airport, the two-hander opens with a tall, strapping black man named Teddy (McKinley Belcher III) inviting a younger, white backpacker into his room. They’ve just met at a hotel bar, where the backpacker, Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger), has missed his flight. Teddy offers his guest a beer and a floor to sleep on, but the situation vibrates with sexual tension.
Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.
It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.
What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.
In One Discordant Violin, the music and narration are central to the story, sometimes complimenting each other and at other times riffing on one another. Adapted by Yann Martel (Life of Pi) from his own short story, the play follows the adventure of a single narrator whose journey provokes a meditation on the meaning of life, the Vietnam War, Trump, the real estate mogul, Joseph Conrad’s stories and fastidious use of punctuation, and the lost dreams of youth.
The setting of BrandoCapote, the multimedia performance piece currently playing at the Tank, is a room at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. It is the location in which Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando in 1957 when the star was filming Sayonara. The play hopscotches from 1957 to 2004, the year Brando died, and the hotel also represents, as the program explains, purgatory.
The New Group playbill says Cyrano is “adapted by Erica Schmidt from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.” Schmidt is a distinguished mid-career stage director and author of All the Fine Boys, a gritty, unsettling 2017 drama which, like Cyrano, was given its New York City premiere by The New Group. As “adaptor,” Schmidt has dismantled Rostand’s 1897 masterpiece, reassembling a few of its elements as a streamlined libretto with a prevailing tone of melancholy.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
Enchanted April has been around longer than you think. If you know the title, it’s probably as a 1991 prestige picture, with Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, and a small cast soaking up the Tuscan sun. But it’s based on an old, old novel by one Elizabeth von Arnim, turned first into a 1925 stage comedy, then a 1935 RKO vehicle that did Ann Harding no favors, then the 1991 remake, then a second, enjoyable stage adaptation by Matthew Barber in 2003. All along, it’s curious nobody saw a musical in it: The lush setting, several love stories, and singable emotions might have been ripe material for, say, a 1954 Lerner and Loewe opus. Which is essentially what the adapters Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Michael Perry (music and lyrics) have attempted—a radically old-fashioned romantic musical.
Despite the title, Barbara Hammond’s futuristic drama Terra Firma is ironically on shaky ground. Having its world premiere at Baruch Performing Arts College, the play is set on an abandoned platform of a country that experience a “Big War” some 50 years earlier. There, three characters have abandoned the mainland and commandeered the site. Sporadically there are explosions on shore—the conflict is apparently not over, or is it?
Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season is being promoted as a “demented romantic comedy,” and it certainly is that—and more. After two years of development at All for One Theater, where Vieh is an artist in residence, and a recent world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Monsoon Season is a strange, funny, and haunting piece, which depicts, with wit and pathos, two lives careening out of control, and yet never takes a condescending or mocking attitude toward its characters.
Games, Henry Naylor’s play about two German athletes in the 1930s, brings to life the challenges and triumphs of Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann, star Jewish fencer and high jumper, respectively, in Nazi Germany. The play follows the women’s development from gifted child athletes through the period when Nazism clouds their futures. Both come from Jewish backgrounds, but Mayer has a non-Jewish mother. Their differing experiences after Hitler’s election and Nazism’s subsequent anti-Jewish restrictions is the meat of Naylor’s two-character play.
Soft Power, the thrilling new musical by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori at the Public Theatre, wears many hats: it’s a funny and touching East-meets-West love story, a postmodern Rodgers and Hammerstein–style book musical with multiple narratives and commentary, and a dazzling celebration of the rhapsodic power of Broadway song-and-dance. But its most potent identity is as a cri de coeur from playwright Hwang on the violence he suffered before the election of Donald Trump and the palpable fear that Trump’s white-supremacist presidency has instilled in non-white Americans.
Matt Williams’s Fear, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, begins with Phil (Enrico Colantoni) dragging 15-year-old Jamie (Alexander Garfin) on stage in a stranglehold. “Why were you at the lake?” Phil demands, in the abandoned tool shed where he takes his prisoner (scenic design by Andrew Boyce). At its best, Fear, soundly directed by Tea Alagić, is propelled by mystery and frayed nerves, with the potential for violence looming. The confrontation is not just between Phil and Jamie, but soon Ethan (Obi Abili) stumbles upon the unusual scene—with Jamie now tied to a chair—and the story of a missing girl in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood becomes about class and cultural conflict.
Greasy fast food certainly takes its toll on the health of Americans, but it’s not usually so direct as death by Fry-O-Later. Such is the grisly fate of Duncan, at the hands of Mac and Pat McBeth, in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Scotland, PA, a musical adaptation of Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, which was a dark-comic send-up of 1970s Middle America using the plot of Macbeth in a fast-food setting.
It has been five years since the last edition of Forbidden Broadway, titled Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging. (It always did.) The long hiatus, however, hasn’t dulled the ruthlessness of Gerard Alessandrini, the Drama Desk–winning lyricist and director who satirizes a range of theater shows and foibles, often using classic show music with his own deft lyrics. And he has probably never been more ruthless than in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. Smart, vicious and superbly cast, it’s sublime.
Walter Kerr’s New York Times review of the original production of Little Shop of Horrors in 1982 started with a bloviating discourse on special effects’ ruination of good theater and its threat to the jobs of live actors. Then he added: “[T]he lyrics aren’t really witty enough to keep us eagerly attentive while the Equity membership is disappearing.” In our post–King Kong world, though, time has had its revenge. His clueless review is now an embarrassing read, while Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s creation has an unassailable stature.
Dramas about alcoholism are usually dour and lugubrious, like the films Days of Wine and Roses or The Lost Weekend. It’s a surprise, therefore, to find playwright Sean Daniels has taken a leaf from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in—quick cuts, actors switching roles expeditiously with the help of a costume elementa, wry humor—to deliver what turns out to be, in the end, a story that can’t escape the sadness and seriousness of the ruin alcoholism can wreak. In spite of the grim story, the journey feels different and fresh.
Tennessee Williams’s 1945 breakout play, The Glass Menagerie, takes place in “memory,” as the brooding narrator/protagonist Tom announces at the start. In Austin Pendleton and Peter Bloch’s production at the Wild Project, Tom’s memories not only haunt the character but literally haunt the entire production with an array of spooky stage effects, which lay a chill on the evening that only the playwright’s poetry can defrost.
Playwrights Horizons is currently housing an unexpected thing in New York City: conservatives openly discussing their beliefs. And liberal New Yorkers are, and should be, flocking to it. Providing a respite from the shock-jock conservatism of Donald Trump and Fox News, Will Arbery’s new play Heroes of the Fourth Turning puts Catholic conservatism onstage in all of its messiness and nuance, daring its audience to listen to what the other side has to say—and maybe even making them care about the characters doing the talking.
Liba Vaynberg’s Round Table is a small play with huge aspirations. Focusing on a pair of nerdy lovers who meet through an online dating app, Vaynberg’s work is at heart a sentimental and sweet romantic comedy. Interspersed throughout, however, are scenes inspired by the legend of King Arthur as well as monologues that break the fourth wall to address heady quandaries about unrequited love, self-idealization, and mortality. To the credit of the winning cast and fleet direction, the intimate production at 59E59 Theaters does not collapse under its own ungainliness.
If Jack Kerouac was the epitome of 1950s beat culture, road-tripping his way across America, then the photographer W. Eugene Smith might just have been his stationary counterpart, discovering jazz, drugs, and artistry in the squalid comfort of his own home. Jaymes Jorsling, in his ambitious and at times stunning new play, (A)loft Modulation, unleashes Smith’s story from linear time, changes the names to poeticize the innocent, and blasts it full of jazz, all the while exploring what it means to be an American, and what it means, simply, to be.
Runboyrun and In Old Age, by Mfoniso Udofia, a master at wordplay, capture the power of letting go of the past. The two plays are part of Udofia’s nine-part cycle that focuses on several generations of Nigerian immigrants who have settled in America. In Runboyrun and In Old Age, a catharsis occurs when the truth is revealed, and characters meet this new feeling with both hope and sadness.
David Staller, the artistic director of the Gingold Group, has made his mission to celebrate the plays of George Bernard Shaw. To that end, the group offers readings of Shaw plays monthly and hosts discussions about him. One play each year receives a fully staged production. The current offering, Caesar and Cleopatra, is a rarity. Although it’s interesting, it’s less satisfying than, for instance, its low-budget Heartbreak House was last season.
