Reviews

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Chasing Happy

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Chasing Happy

Chasing Happy, a new play by Michel Wallerstein, takes its name from the title of a best-selling, posthumously published book by John Ryan, the late partner of the play’s main character, Nick. John was killed by a gunman at a Pride parade, a crime that Nick calls “random.” Based on the excerpts Nick reads from the memoir cum self-help tome, John—who was born post-Stonewall and lived in Provincetown, Mass.—was wracked with self-loathing and shame about his homosexuality and remained closeted with many people. His book offers such banal affirmations as “I exist, I am worthy, I am love” and “Let me become who I truly am.” (Another character describes it as “one big stew of Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle, mixed with some gay cliché stuff.”)

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Partnership

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Partnership

An advantageous business offer, with a loveless marriage thrown in: this is one of the would-be “partnerships” around which Elizabeth Baker’s 1917 drama Partnership, a feminist parable and Romantic cri de coeur in the guise of a comedy of manners, revolves. As is so often the case with the plays that the Mint Theater Company rescues from obscurity, the issues are both historically specific and still relevant. Must the demands of business always be at odds with personal nourishment? Should one prize practicality or love? Does respectability entail a life of drudgery, while a life well lived means being branded as “mad”?

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Scrambled Eggs

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Scrambled Eggs

Reginald L. Wilson pulls no punches when it comes to tackling the subject of domestic violence in his new play, Scrambled Eggs. Directed by Fulton C. Hodges, and coinciding with Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the work explores this major public health problem in all its terrible guises. Set in Tallahassee, Fla., the family drama centers on Terrence (Wilson), a construction worker in his 40s who has trouble holding down a job because of alcohol and marijuana. He’s married to Sable (Tatiana Scott), a college graduate with a degree in education who left her teaching job after Terrence persuaded her to stay home and devote her time to family and their primary schooler named Lil T (Christopher Woodley).

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The Lights Are On

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The Lights Are On

In addition to crafting an engrossing thriller, dramatist Owen Panettieri shows a gift for prognostication with The Lights Are On. He wrote the play before the pandemic—it had been set for a fall opening in 2020 when COVID shut down all theater—yet it has a character who hoards toilet paper and face masks, wipes down the groceries and stays home all the time.

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Bite Me

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Bite Me

Eliana Pipes’ Bite Me—a 90-minute drama having its world premiere in a coproduction by WP Theater and Colt Coeur—has an ABC Afterschool Special vibe. It’s about high schoolers in distress, but is not harsh and graphic like much of today's teen fare; its gentleness is more in line with the ’70s-era standards of those Afterschool Specials, minus the sappiness and didacticism.

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The Making of a Great Moment

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The Making of a Great Moment

The Making of a Great Moment is, at least the press release implies, supposed to be about a cross-country bike trip. But it turns out that Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s play at Urban Stages is mostly about other things. Maybe even calling it a “play” isn’t quite right; it’s closer to performance art, or an actors’ exercise, a chance for Bill Bowers and Esther Williamson to try on a closetful of identities, all the while philosophizing about the meaning of art, the meaning of life, the value of performing. Which they attack with great enthusiasm, at times making you forget the banality of much of the material. Is The Making of a Great Moment interesting? Sometimes. But it lacks discipline.

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Mary Gets Hers

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Mary Gets Hers

Emma Horwitz’s new comedy, Mary Gets Hers, is a quirky coming-of-age story. Inspired by a 10th-century comedy, Abraham, by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, Horwitz has retooled her work for contemporary audiences, with a lot of tomfoolery folded in, and director Josiah Davis, Horwitz’s long-time collaborator, has cast women in all the roles.

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Swing State

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Swing State

So why is Rebecca Gilman’s new drama called Swing State? Granted, it takes place in rural Wisconsin, in the recent past, when COVID shots were novelties and the Delta variant was lurking. But there’s not a lot political going on among her four principals, beyond a general head-butting between Peg (Mary Beth Fisher), the liberal, nature-loving recent widow occupying Todd Rosenthal’s hyperrealistic prairie home set, and the more traditionalist, presumably Trump-loving denizens around her. (Gratefully, the man himself rates only one mention.) In fact, when you get down to it, there’s really not a lot of anything going on.

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Dig

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Dig

The plant-store setting of Theresa Rebeck’s play Dig might be reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors, but in Dig the plants are the victims, not the aggressors—victims of human selfishness, anger, and desire. For Roger (Jeffrey Bean), the tightly wound owner of the store (which is named Dig), the damage done to plants is more keenly felt than the damage human beings do to others or to themselves; and it is also more easily addressed, as Roger is a master of restoring vitality and life to seemingly doomed plants. With people, he’d really rather not be bothered.

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Cross That River

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Cross That River

Fact marries fiction in the new musical Cross That River, a tale about a runaway named Blue who escapes slavery in the 1860s to become one of America’s first black cowboys. Soulfully directed by Reggie Life, and starring jazz musician Allan Harris, Cross That River has music and lyrics by Harris, and a book written by Harris and his wife, Pat Harris. Although its musical patterns are mostly defined by a spirited jazz and blues vibe, there are also dashes of gospel, country and western, and African rhythms that pulsate in the vibrant songs.

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Job

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Job

Max Wolf Friedlich packs a boomer–Gen Z clash, thoughts about modern technology, gender politics, liberals’ self-flagellation, the belligerent anxiety that’s become our national character, and a whopper of a twist into the 85-minute run time of Job, his first play produced Off Broadway. Also making her Off-Broadway debut with Job is actress Sydney Lemmon, granddaughter of movie legend Jack, recently seen opposite Cate Blanchett in Tár and opposite the venomous Roy clan on Succession—where her Job costar, Peter Friedman, had a recurring role.

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

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Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors

The stakes are high, and quite pointy, in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. In this jocular take on that jugular-loving creature of the night, blood is sucked, true love is tested and vanity finds a way to survive in the soul of a monster who ironically cannot cast his own reflection in a mirror. Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic tale provides the groundwork, but the spirit of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and the ghost of Charles Ludlam, lift the evening to its batty heights.

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Infinite Life

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Infinite Life

Annie Baker makes her much-anticipated return to Off-Broadway with the world premiere of Infinite Life, a coproduction with Britain’s National Theatre. The play, once titled On the Uses of Pain for Life, was slated for Fall 2021 at Signature Theatre, but it never materialized; Baker’s most recent play, The Antipodes, was produced at Signature in 2017. It takes only a few moments of Infinite Life’s halting and delightfully awkward opening exchange for Baker to captivate with her uncanny blend of the naturalistic and the absurd, honing in on human frailty with a merciless yet empathetic eye, this time trained on patients at an alternative pain clinic in Northern California.

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Bioadapted

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Bioadapted

Bioadapted, a new theater piece created and directed by Tjaša Ferme, and written by James Yu and Alexis Roblan, is a hybrid play drawn from sources as disparate as a 2020 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that was written by ChatGPT; transcripts of panels of scientists discussing the subject; and scientists interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). Turning transcripts into drama has been around a long while—from Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice and Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde to the recent Is This a Room, which took dialogue verbatim from FBI interviews with Reality Winner.

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

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Doris Day: My Secret Love

Paul Adams, the founder and artistic director of The Emerging Artists Theatre, knows a thing or two about digging up dirt. In his 2016 NY Fringe howler, The Cleaning Guy, he recounted his quarter century of maintaining various Manhattan apartments (including Agnes de Mille’s in her last days) to make a buck. Now, as the writer behind the tell-all, Doris Day: My Secret Love, he peels back the movie star’s squeaky-clean image to reveal a rather bleak biography with bullet points that include being married thrice by age 28, suffering a philandering father, crimes against her body and her bank account, panic attacks and the unexpected deaths of those whom she counted on the most. Is it any wonder she would ultimately focus her energies on pet care and animal adoption? 

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A Will to Live

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A Will to Live

New lives that spring from trauma can often take surprising turns. The people who may seem most likely to be permanently damaged can demonstrate the ability to heal, be empathetic, to love, and even to forgive. The indomitable spirit of Helena Weinrauch, whose world was brutally torn apart in occupied Poland during World War II, is reflected viscerally, visually, and poetically in A Will to Live, Kirk Gostkowki’s adaptation of Weinrauch’s 2008 memoir.

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A Séance with Mom

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A Séance with Mom

Actress-playwright-comedian Nancy Redman has returned to the Chain Studio Theatre for the third run of her one-woman show, A Séance with Mom.  Directed by Austin Pendleton, the piece is performed on a bare stage, with only a chair, small table, and walker at its side. Its six characters are conjured up by Redman with her expressive voice, elastic face, and physical comedy. Redman, who has been described as a cross-fertilization of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, steers clear of politics, preferring to take a deep dive into family relationships and the human condition.

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Pay the Writer

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Pay the Writer

With TV star Marcia Cross and beloved stage actor Bryan Batt in the cast, two Tony winners on the design team, and recognizable names among the producers, Pay the Writer would appear to be a solidly financed production. Yet it has a kind of low-rent look to it and clunky staging.

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A Eulogy for Roman

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A Eulogy for Roman

Going to a solo show that is set up as a memorial service might not sound like a particularly inviting theatrical experience during the dog days of summer. But A Eulogy for Roman, written and performed by the beguiling Brendan George, proves that saying farewell to a childhood friend doesn’t have to be an occasion for tears but can be a time for making new promises.

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Let’s Call Her Patty

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Let’s Call Her Patty

For older females, upper middle-class life, even when coated with a veneer of happiness, creature comforts, and respectability, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Playwright Zarina Shea’s Let’s Call Her Patty focuses on this milieu via an Upper West Side woman, flanked by her daughter and niece. Margot Bordelon’s direction reflects first the comic, then the tragic aspects of such a life.   

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