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.”
Brothers Bob and Tobly McSmith have created a cottage industry of musicals based—unauthorized, they always make it clear—on popular movies and TV shows of the past 30 years. They even have a cottage for their industry: the Theater Center at 50th and Broadway, where their new show Singfeld! A Musical Parody About Nothing has joined The Office! The Musical Parody and Friends: The Musical Parody in repertory.
Nikhil Parmar’s relentlessly kinetic solo show Invisible is an impressive hourlong workout for the actor. The words tumble out, the situations are plentiful, and he breaks the fourth wall time and again. If he had not written the piece for himself, one might regard the movement as a mistake by a novice, but Parmar intends to show what he can do, vocally and physically, and with a vengeance.
Justin Huertas’s Lizard Boy, a queer pop-rock indie musical with a sci-fi vibe, is funny, poignant, and life-affirming. Huertas, as the titular character, is a sweet and likable protagonist in this coming-of-age love story even though he suffers from having green, scaly skin. Cleverly directed by Brandon Ivie, and under the aegis of Prospect Theater Company, this show is a terrific homage to—and satire of—comic-book mythology.
Foxes, set in a Black Caribbean community in London, is a sly and thoughtful exploration of a series of taboo subjects. Meera (Nemide May), who is from a Muslim family, tells her boyfriend Daniel (Raphel Famotibe), who is from a Caribbean Christian family, that she is pregnant. That creates a big problem: how will these two young people, from different cultural and religious backgrounds, work it out? They are also at the beginning of their young adult life, trying to determine their future. Daniel is planning on going to university, or “uni” as the Brits call it.
Beginning with a chance meeting, David J. Glass’s new play Love + Science traces the lives of two gay medical students amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. After a 1981 welcoming ceremony for medical students at Columbia, Jeff (Jonathan Burke) asks another student, Matt (Matt Walker), to take his picture. Soon they are revealing intimacies that suggest personal minefields: “My mother sent her best wishes,” says Matt, tentative and reserved, while the forthright Jeff announces, “I got, ‘Get out of my house, you faggot,’ when I was 17 … been on my own ever since.” Jeff also registers that Matt is a whiz kid—he’s only 20 (though he’ll be far older by the end).
Tori Sampson’s This Land Was Made is a steamy gumbo of history, humor, and imagination. Directed by Taylor Reynolds, it serves up a fictive account of the origins of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Although the play has some structural flaws, it invites one to ponder the issues that animated this revolutionary social organization—racist police brutality and economic injustice—and to consider how they still resonate today.
Memory, when conveyed on stage, traditionally arrives in the form of a flashback, or a soliloquy. But in John J. Caswell, Jr.’s frantic and surreal family drama Wet Brain, memory is a foreign object to be cut from the stomach, or a hypersonic shared experience that blasts through outer space even as it is grounded in that most triggering of locales, the family room in the house of a decidedly dysfunctional brood.
Sports, friendship and Lebron James are central to Rajiv Joseph’s play King James. The renowned basketball player, known by the epithet of the title, brings two unlikely sports fanatics together to form a long-term bond that surpasses a ball game.
Romantic relationships can be a bushel of complex emotions. In her new play, Bees & Honey, Guadalís Del Carmen explores the intricacies of a Dominican American couple living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The play begins with a segment in which its two principals talk about Juan Luis Guerra’s bachata song, “Como Abeja al Panal” (i.e., “like a bee to its honeycomb”), which inspired the title Bees & Honey. The composer Guerra, as described in the play, “is and will always be the Beethoven of Latin America.”
Jane Austen’s work has never been an easy read, but in the way she weaves her characters’ complex personalities into her novels she attempts to provide the reader a window into their early 19th-century English culture. Yet perhaps because of cultural and linguistic norms of the time, some characters are not easily accessible. Writers Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon jointly explore George Wickham in Being Mr. Wickham, giving the audience a social, parlor-like closeup—an almost intimate one—of the very man whom Austen vilifies in Pride and Prejudice.
At the outset of Orlando, playwright-performer Lucy Roslyn says she discovered Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel (also titled Orlando) at a “jumble sale” when she was 12. Roslyn, from England’s West Midlands, explains that a jumble sale is what Americans call a yard sale. She also mentions that hers is a Coventry accent and that Woolf’s Orlando, in successive editions, has been a treasured companion since she bought that flea-market paperback years ago.
Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust is a tender and riveting play about trauma and the difficulties of human connection that is by turns funny and upsetting, and ultimately uplifting. Its power lies in Booth’s ability to avoid cynicism and create characters capable of genuine surprise, without veering into melodrama or oversentimentality. Director Knud Adams, who also directed Booth’s Paris at the Atlantic Theater in 2020, achieves a smart balance between naturalism and the unreality of a memory play, with a superb cast, led by William Jackson Harper in a performance of uncanny vulnerability.
The National Asian American Theatre Company’s Romeo and Juliet may just go down as the season’s most misdirected production. Employing Hansol Jung’s modern-verse adaptation as its text, codirectors Jung and Dustin Wills no doubt intended to revamp Shakespeare’s tragedy by leaning into its comedy to point up the darker aspects. But what one gets is a travesty of the play.
Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.
The turmoil of refugee family life following World War II—the traumas of escaping genocide, identifying the dead, and hunting for the missing—lingers until today. Holocaust survivors have often been separated by cities, continents, political and ideological barriers, and sometimes by religion. The postwar obstacles to reassembling family units are daunting. Mark Weiner’s compelling drama Hidden confronts the pain of that separation and the feelings of abandonment, loss, anger, and confusion that persist, even when those separated are reunited.
Part ghost story, part coming-of-age drama, part memory play, Being Chaka—written by Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi and Nalini Sharma—is a provocative investigation into racism in America. The surreal plot centers on the character Chaka (Kahiem Rivera), a black 16-year-old transfer student at East Prep High School in Manhattan. As the action unfolds, the audience will see him continually shifting between reality and dreamscapes, with the line between the two worlds often blurring.
People can be damaged by those they love or admire. They can sometimes be repaired, too, with the help of others. And often the shared desire to be healed is a salve in itself. Such are the truths swirling beneath the meditation and mindfulness sessions on display in The Fears. It is a toss-up as to whether playwright Emma Sheanshang has crafted a strikingly sad comedy or a quite funny drama. The play’s seven characters all walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy. And because the action is set in a Buddhist center, they do so without their shoes.
Lucie Tiberghien, artistic director of Molière in the Park, has scored a coup—an English-language world premiere of Tartuffe that uses Moliere’s uncensored version as its basis. Tiberghien’s production is the first English rendering to draw on a restoration of the original text by Georges Forestier that played in 2022 at the Comédie Française.
“The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” The words are those of Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens, and the philosophy gets a healthy workout in Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain, Joe Baer’s one-man retrospective of the life and works—but mostly the life—of America’s great author. Baer loves his subject, and he works up a worthy retelling of Clemens’s life and times. He might have labored harder to carry them into a modern perspective, but it’s still a pleasant, leisurely ride.
Ron Lasko’s new immersive theater experience, A Gaga Guide to the Lower East Side, takes audiences on a walking tour of the Lower East Side to visit locations and venues that were frequented by pop star Lady Gaga during the start of her singing career.
