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.”
Much about Adolf Hitler was incongruous. Infatuated with his own greatness and that of the “Fatherland,” he pontificated about Aryan superiority, order, and sacrifice, yet his life was chaotic, fueled by anger and drug-induced delusions; he was obsessive and paranoid. In H*tler’s Tasters, playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks has brilliantly adapted the true story of 15 women who were employed to taste the paranoid leader’s food. It’s a timely drama with dark humor and music.
Despite the lofty title, Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God is a play that at first might seem small, its subject matter as constrained as the little box of an office in which all the action takes place, dwarfed by the expanse of the Irene Diamond stage at Signature Theatre (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado). But as this sad and tender piece unfolds, it’s able to touch on universal questions by looking closely at the intersection of two ordinary lives during moments of particular vulnerability.
Wallace Demarriá’s play Colorblind, about the leader of a Black empowerment movement, debuted in Los Angeles in 2013 and is just now having its New York premiere. During the time between the two productions, George Floyd’s murder and Donald Trump’s embrace of white nationalists have altered the conversation around racial issues in the United States. The only apparent tweak to the play, though, is a prologue in which Clinton Muhammad, a supposedly controversial activist, makes a speech claiming that Trump was elected because Americans freaked out over having a Black president.
For Downtown Abbey aficionados, it is an unlikely stretch to imagine Lesley Nicol as anyone other than the series’ jovial, wise cook, Mrs. Patmore. The leap of imagination that transforms Patmore into a painfully shy, insecure, aspiring and often overlooked actress is a dilemma with which the audience for How the Hell Did I Get Here? must grapple. Ironically, Mrs. Patmore and Ms. Nicol may share a Northern British accent, but that’s where any comparison ends. The former’s “extreme makeover” as fashionable Lesley Nicol is not a makeover at all, but an internal and external transformation from her early childhood. Isn’t that what good acting is all about?
When Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac opened in 1897, it was hailed not only for its poetry but for its elaborate sets—one for each of the five acts, from bakery to battlefield—and for its poetry and grandiose passions. Martin Crimp’s version of the story of unrequited love, produced and directed by Jamie Lloyd at BAM, has only the faintest glimmers of any exaltation. More often it’s simply disappointing.
Alfred Hitchcock famously described the basis of suspense as a situation in which there is a ticking time bomb under a table. The audience knows it is only a matter of minutes in which the bomb will explode, and they sit on the edge of their seats in anticipation of the outcome. Applying this principle, Marco Antonio Rodriguez initially establishes a veritable minefield in his new play Bloom, currently running at the IATI Theater. In the totalitarian world in which the play is set, a mother has been ordered to kill her son, and if she does not do so within precisely one hour, unimaginable horrors will follow.
Richard Chang mixes history and fiction in Citizen Wong to tell the story of Wong Chin Foo, the nineteenth-century Chinese-American journalist, activist, performer, and lecturer who fought for equal rights for Chinese-Americans and to dispel pernicious, racist stereotypes about Chinese people and culture. Presented by Pan Asian Repertory, Citizen Wong is co-directed by Ernest Abuba and Chongren Fan and features a cast of six, with the actors playing multiple characters, including historical personages or those inspired by such. The work is ambitious and timely, explicitly drawing connections to the present-day rise in anti-Asian bigotry.
SuperHero began performances the day after a gunman opened fire aboard a rush-hour Brooklyn subway train, giving added resonance to its protagonist’s decision to eschew violence as a response to personal turmoil. The playwriting debut of actor Ian Eaton, SuperHero is an autobiographical coming-of-age story about an awkward, overweight boy growing up in the Harlem projects in the 1980s.
It is a quirk of American theater that some of its most beloved musicals involve the specter of tyranny overseas. Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret and The Sound of Music each serve up friendship and love in the face of vanishing personal freedoms. There are echoes of all three shows in Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow, with book and lyrics by Bruce Sussman, receiving a beautifully staged New York premiere by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, after some 25 years of revision, delays and productions in La Jolla, Calif., Los Angeles and Atlanta.
In his new comedy-drama To My Girls, playwright JC Lee adds to a subgenre of plays about gay gatherings in which groups of friends thrash out problems and settle old scores with comic bitchiness. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is the forerunner of them all; later touchstones include Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg, Chuck Ranberg’s End of the World Party and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! Lee’s To My Girls, under the direction of Stephen Brackett, is a respectable entry, reflecting a sea change in racial politics and behavior.
If you’re sentimental about past-their-prime forms of transit, and if you can look past the infelicity that is Amtrak, it’s easy to fall in love with trains. They occupy so many iconic moments in American literature and film, and there are so many songs about them. It’s enough to send you into Songs About Trains, a new musical revue, waxing nostalgic. Then note the subtitle: A Celebration of Labor Through Folk Music. If you’re fond of Woody Guthrie and his ilk and tales of Casey Jones and John Henry, well, the show’s already halfway down the track. But Songs About Trains turns out to be even richer than that. It’s not just songs about trains: It can be seen as the whole damn history of American expansion.
Mime is a silent art of storytelling that requires great physical expressiveness. It is often associated with street performers, but Broken Box Mime’s Take Shape sets a new paradigm for the art form: mime as performance for the theater. Eight vignettes range in themes from global warming to cooking and parenting. There are no props, stage design or costume changes. All the stories in Take Shape are conveyed through the highly physicalized art of pantomime.
A teenage, runaway heroin addict with daddy issues and a former graffiti artist long past his glory days explore the borders of friendship and codependency in Larry & Lucy, a gritty little slice-of-life one-act spinning its wheels on the intimate basement stage at Theater for the New City. Playwright Peter Welch propels his title characters forward through a whirlwind couple of days in and out of Los Angeles while simultaneously pulling them back to their unhappy pasts via brief flashbacks woven throughout the piece. If the duo’s actions are at best unusual, and at worst highly unlikely or confusing, the offbeat performances and noir atmosphere conjured up by director Joe John Batista make for a trippy ride to the West Coast.
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.
Written in 1942, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet was intended to be the first of multiple plays about the Irish experience in America. O’Neill’s cycle was never completed, and the play was produced posthumously, in 1958. The Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival, masterfully directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, is a gut-wrenching drama that focuses on the Irish American Melody clan in the Boston of 1828. Led by Con (for Cornelius) Melody (Robert Cuccioli), a ne’er-do-well immigrant and inn owner who recites Lord Byron’s poetry, most of the characters live in a world full of delusions.
Hope blooms even in the darkest and cruelest of times in Heartland, by Gabriel Jason Dean. The story pairs two unlikely geographical places: Omaha, Nebraska, and Afghanistan. Geetee (Mari Vial-Golden), is an Afghani orphan who was displaced by war and adopted by Harold (Mark Cuddy), an Afghani scholar who teaches at the University of Nebraska. She returns to her homeland as an adult to teach at Blue Sky, a school for girls. There she meets Nazrullah (Naz, for short), a math teacher at the school.
Keith Huff likes to write about blue-collar thirtysomething white dudes from Chicago. His magnum opus, A Steady Rain, made a high-profile Broadway debut back in 2009—high-profile because it starred Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as a pair of Windy City cops (both were good). With his latest, Garbageman, Huff is maintaining a considerably lower profile, at the 60-or-so-seat Chain Theatre space on West 36th Street, and instead of Jackman and Craig we get Deven Anderson and Kirk Gostkowski. But once again he’s given us a two-hander about hapless blue-collar dudes, trying to make sense of a series of bad fates, and in so doing, revealing both their humanity and their lack thereof.
Insights into Cambodian identity and immigrant experiences are the strongest thread running through What You Are Now, Sam Chanse’s drama at Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in which a young neuroscientist sees new research on trauma-related memory as a way to finally heal her mother, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1970s Cambodia.
Poking fun at Shakespeare has been a fruitful pastime for more than a century. George Bernard Shaw enjoyed taking the Bard down a peg in his reviews of Victorian productions. In the 1950s Richard Armour wrote cheeky synopses of the plays in Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, and in 2015 the Broadway musical Something Rotten made fun of Shakespeare himself. Now actress and playwright Talene Monahon has done her bit to twist the dagger a few more times into the playwright with an often funny and splendidly acted Jane Anger.
This Space Between Us contains the opposite of an 11 o’clock number. The nonmusical scene late in the play is a showstopper all right, though not in the rousing good sense. Rather, all action and dialogue literally stop while two characters stand over an air mattress as it inflates. It lasts ... well, however long it takes an air mattress to inflate, which may only be about a minute but seems a lot longer, since the audience has to sit there and wait out this unnecessary moment in a show that has already worn out its welcome.
