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.
Rules of Desire is the first new play by William Mastrosimone (Extremities) to premiere in New York in some time. And this 90-minute, three-character piece, directed by William Roudebush, is a head-scratcher: Whatever points it makes get muddled by ambiguous character development, a far-fetched setup and one long scene that gives new meaning to “toxic masculinity.”
Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) is a lively new play by Andrea Thome that presents stories of immigration and fear from Latino immigrants in New York City. Filled with music and dance, Fandango lightens the darkness of its topic without soft-pedaling it.
Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Timothy Douglas and playing in repertory with Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Dracula at Classic Stage Company, is a strange hybrid of the ploddingly literal and the vaguely conceptual. Its pleasures lie in listening to Stephanie Berry, who plays both Victor Frankenstein and “the Creature,” recite long passages of beautiful prose. But as a piece of theater, it is a flat, almost somnolent experience, and one that doesn’t seem to say anything new or urgent about the story.
The life of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to have won the Miss America title, in 1945, was two sides of a coin: the face was that of a very beautiful, proud, and successful woman, but her private life involved difficult relationships, most notably with her daughter, Barbara (Barra) Grant. Their mother-daughter interaction, and Bess’s attempts to create her daughter in her own image, are the center of Grant’s solo play/memoir Miss America’s Ugly Daughter. The audience never sees the subject, but she is sometimes heard offstage, her voice (by Anna Holbrook) always booming and intruding in her child’s life.
In Kate Hamill’s adaption of Bram Stoker’s Dracula at Classic Stage Company, fighting against vampires becomes synonymous with fighting the patriarchy. With Sarna Lapine directing (she also directed Hamill’s Little Women) and a stellar cast, Hamill’s Dracula manages to be hilarious without descending into farce, perhaps because so much of the humor is in the service of a feminist reshaping of Stoker’s novel, which turns the struggle against vampires into a struggle for self-individuation and self-determination.
Drew Droege made a big splash with his 2017 hit Bright Colors and Bold Patterns, in which his main character, Gerry, attended a gay wedding whose intendeds had asked on their invitation that nobody wear bright colors or bold patterns. Droege’s solo performance as Gerry let one know the other characters through his reactions to them. Now he is back with another solo show keyed to an important event: Happy Birthday Doug. And once again, he is making mincemeat of stereotypes in the gay world.
Cary Gitter’s The Sabbath Girl, produced by the Penguin Rep and currently at 59e59, is an attempt at a throwback romantic comedy, a story of two lonely souls from different cultural worlds who find each other in the big city and forge ahead in the name of love despite all the obstacles.
Lily Akerman’s The Commons should come with a trigger warning for anyone who has ever had multiple roommates in a New York City apartment. She depicts four roommates (three millennials and one Gen Xer) as they navigate the harrowing questions and minutiae of shared space—the buildup of burnt tomato sauce on a stove top, the viability of leftover jars of food, the ethics of decluttering, the disappearance of chocolate almonds, the gendering of certain chores, and, God forbid, the presence of a mouse—with various shades of aggression and passive-aggression.
Jean Dobie Giebel’s Chasing the River follows the post-incarceration difficulties of Kat (Christina Elise Perry), who returns to her childhood home to seek closure on a disrupted life. Playwright Giebel delays explaining, until the play’s conclusion, the reason Kat went to prison, and that choice is a double-edged sword. Although it creates suspense as to what really took place in her family home, keeping Kat’s crime and the backstory shrouded in mystery poses a problem for the actor who must sustain the anguish of a past life and bring it to a crescendo at the end.
Leegrid Stevens’s A Peregrine Falls, now at the Wild Project under the direction of Padraic Lillis, tells the story of a Mormon family in Austin, Texas, in 2010 and 2012, as they grapple with the aftermath of horrific family abuse. The play combines realism, in scenes taking place in hospital and state-court waiting areas and a family-owned car dealership (scenic design by Zoë Hurwitz), with flights of dream imagery and symbolism, the latter mostly conveyed by a narrator who is both within and without the story (the peregrine of the title stands for the ultimate predator, a bird who preys on other birds).
It’s not long into the new musical Darling Grenadine, after a brief direct address to the audience by Adam Kantor’s ingratiating lead character, Harry, that the first song comes, but it takes till the top of the second act to get to the song that gives the show its bizarre title. It’s an ode to the pomegranate syrup that goes into a Shirley Temple, and by that time what began as a romance of struggling artists in New York City has found an unexpected path through the shopworn trappings of such tales.
The Mint Theater Company has once again returned to excavating the long-forgotten dramatic works of Miles Malleson, a 20th-century British actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories presents a pair of one-act dramas based on short stories by the Russian literary giants and adapted by Malleson. Audience members with passing familiarity of works by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy will surely not expect to see a rom-com double bill, and yet the plays reflect the authors’ depths of compassion and devotion to social and spiritual uplift.
Nearly two years ago Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, which revolves around a high-stakes family dinner party, opened at Soho Rep’s theater on Walker Street. The devastating play compelled audiences to examine their attitudes toward race and class in the United States and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Currently playing in the same theater (presented not by Soho Rep but by Page 73), Zora Howard’s Stew also centers on the stressful preparation of a meal while addressing issues confronting African Americans, particularly women, in the 21st century. Stew does not have the raw power of its predecessor, but in its assault on the senses, the play is ultimately unnerving.
The script for Simon Stone’s Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) carries the notation “after Euripides.” Anyone who attends and expects tunics and armbands will therefore be disappointed: Stone has modernized the story of the spurned wife of Jason, the Argonaut who turned to the daughter of Creon for physical comfort. His version changes the names of the characters: Medea is Anna; Jason is Lucas; Creon is Christopher; and Creon’s daughter, who doesn’t appear in Euripides, is named Clara and is very much present.
An evening of one-act plays, such as those in Brecht: Call and Respond, presents considerable challenges. Playwrights and actors must develop and sustain their characterizations quickly and intensely over a shorter period of time. The umbrella title for three works, Brecht: Call and Respond includes The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht, Sunset Point by Arlene Hutton, and Self Help in the Anthropocene by Kristin Idaszak (the last two were commissioned by New Light Theater Company in 2019).
How exciting and new the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice must have seemed when it hit pre-multiplex screens in 1969. Along with such contemporary classics as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, and with the added inducement of major movie stars wearing few clothes, Paul Mazursky’s satire proffered trendy sex; inspired materialistic adults to question their values; laughed about pot, one of the first big releases to do so; spoofed middle-class mores; and served up newly permissible bare breasts, though not Natalie Wood’s or Dyan Cannon’s. As a time capsule, the movie holds up. But why, in 2020, do a musical version?
Buzz McLaughlin’s 1996 play, Sister Calling My Name, tells a familial story of loss, love and forgiveness. At the center is Michael (John Marshall) an English literature professor whose life has not gone according to his expectations. He has recently undergone a divorce and been denied tenure, and the last thing he wants to do is visit his mentally disabled sister Lindsey (Gillian Todd), who made his life extremely difficult growing up.
Doctors Jane and Alexander wrestles with the idea of what it means to live in the shadow of a famous parent. Written, directed and produced by Edward Einhorn, the play focuses on the life of his mother, Jane Einhorn. She was the daughter of Alexander S. Wiener, a scientist who became famous (with Karl Landsteiner) for the discovery of the Rh factor in blood, critical knowledge for the success of transfusions
Arriving during this primary season like a theatrical rejoinder to all the Democratic hand-wringing over the working class, Paris is an honest portrayal of people who need every dollar they earn. Or it’s a sly commentary on how race figures into a seemingly nonracist environment (i.e., one full of “nice” white people). Or it’s just a well-performed and engaging workplace dramedy. However it’s viewed, this sharply written, superbly acted new play provides theatergoers with a jolt from winter doldrums.
The Fellowship for Performing Arts concentrates its efforts on drama with a Christian theme. Previously it has presented an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters; Shadowlands, a 1990 drama about Lewis himself and his middle-aged romance with an American Jewish woman; and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960), about Sir Thomas More. But its current production of Paradise Lost is a heartening leap forward for the company.
