The Twenty Sided Tavern, inspired by Hasbro’s tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, isn’t easy to categorize. It’s a combination of comedy, mystery, improv, and puzzle, and at times it looks and sounds like a television game show.
There have been many memorable productions at the Irish Rep over the years—of Beckett, Synge, Friel, O’Casey, McPherson, and more—but with Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, it’s clear that the venerable nonprofit theater has a robust and self-deprecating sense of humor, able to laugh about the dominant tropes of Irish drama and the innumerable depictions of trauma and strife. Smyth’s play, developed under the theater’s New Play Development initiative and directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey, who leads that initiative, is a departure from its typical fare: a funny, satirical exploration of Irish theater, stories, and cultural identity.
“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”
Written in 2000 and inspired by the Y2K scare, Eric Bogosian’s dark apocalyptic play Humpty Dumpty is finally receiving its New York premiere after debuting at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., in 2002. At that time, Bogosian’s script included dialogue that eerily foreshadowed the September 11 attacks. Now it serves as a cautionary tale about mankind’s dependence on technology.
In Two Minds is a new Irish play about the way a mother and daughter's intimate relationship is tested by mental illness. Playwright Joanne Ryan has constructed a story in which a mother’s behavior, resulting from bipolar disorder, tests her daughter’s resolve, love and support. Daughter (the characters are unnamed) knows she has little control to prevent her mother’s descent into depression, like watching a sinking ship. The play presents two portraits of the bipolar’s emotional toll compassionately but accurately. It is gritty and unflinching.
What happens when people who have far too much money for their own good run out of things to do, but are desperate never to be bored? Young Minds Productions offers one tantalizing answer to this question in Sex and Hunger, a new play by Kyoung H. Park that presents one night in the lives of a group of tragically over-entitled young people in a Manhattan penthouse. Park
Bag Fulla Money is that rarest of shows, a dark comedy that actually gets lighter as it goes along rather than becoming increasingly heavy. Writer Scott Brooks's production, currently gracing Theater Row's Clurman Theater, is not just a madcap mystery full of double crosses. It is also a sterling example of how solid plotting can buttress even the most trivial-seeming piece of entertainment. Oscar (Christopher Wisner) is a chef working in the basement kitchen of a four-star hotel owned by Mr. Prescott (Stu Richel). Indeed, that is where the entire action of the play occurs, and it kicks into high gear following Oscar's discovery of the titular bag, which contains blood money hidden by two hit men, English (Richard Mazda) and Randall (Darius Stone). The amount is more than a million dollars.
First Oscar enlists the help of his fiancée, Becky (Heather Dilly), who becomes aroused at the mere scent of money. It is not long before she is trying to turn on Oscar by seducing Jimmy (Jon Ecklund), Mr. Prescott's vapid son. The play's convolutions escalate as an interloper named Jonesy (David A. White) and his wife, Laverne (Diana DeLaCruz), separately angle their way into this tangled web—all while trying to avoid the wrath of English and Randall.
The beauty of director Sam Viverito's fluid production is how it never succumbs to any predictable choices, like bumbling slapstick moments, along the way. In fact, with characters entering and exiting as often as they do, he has blocked Money in the great tradition of classic English parlor-room comedies. Brooks has surprises in store at almost every turn, and Viverito not only moves the action along at a good clip but, in hindsight, makes clear each character's sometimes multiple motivations. That said, a scene in which Laverne tries to hide in the kitchen lacks credibility.
And even though the first act addresses murder and dismemberment, Brooks's show actually gets funnier as it goes along and the pieces of his ever-shifting puzzle coalesce. At the performance I saw, the first act was roughly twice as long as the second, which consists largely of denouement. I've been told that at subsequent performances this unnecessary intermission (the show runs just under 90 minutes with one) has been eliminated. Still, the show's last scene, satisfying and conclusive as it is, could use a little more punch to provide a sense of finality.
Viverito has assembled a uniformly stellar cast. DeLaCruz has the facial gestures of a silent-film-era actress, and Ecklund works overtime to make Jimmy seem believably clueless. White offers an enormous amount of charisma as Jonesy, whom the audience sees as both a villain and a charming enigma.
But it is Heather Dilly who runs away with the show from her first moment onstage. Becky is a master manipulator, but Dilly's performance fills in all the shades of gray that fall between femme fatale and class clown. She is bold enough to command the stage in every scene—no one in the audience can look elsewhere during any of her scenes—and she combines those moments with goofy physical comedy, masterful timing, and an often rapid-fire delivery that expresses dominance and panic all at once. Dilly is like a combination of old Hollywood actresses Lucille Ball, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck.
Keep an eye on her. In Bag Fulla Money, a show thick with thieves, she steals the show.
An older man sits with a younger woman in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. The man looks respectable in his suit and tie. The woman is fresh and attractive. We soon discover, if we have not already guessed, that the two are lovers. And if the barely subdued panic in both their eyes has not led us to the next logical conclusion, the young woman soon states it plainly: she is pregnant. What sets this scene apart from its Jerry Springer-level ilk, however, is exactly what captured the nation's prurient attention back in 2001: he is a U.S. congressman, and she is an intern who is about to go missing.
Or are they? In Rob Handel
There is a Russian proverb, so I am told, that says,
I'm sitting on an extremely uncomfortable and upright couch in the smallish Dixon Place theater on Bowery. My girlfriend, Jenn, has instantly chosen a better seat. I agree to move to the more comfortable couch. Jenn briefly entertains the idea of changing seats again, and I veto the notion. I am the theater critic, and I'm letting my girlfriend dictate our seating preference. Well, enough is enough, I say to myself. We will sit here and watch the opening night of Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century. I will watch it impartially and keep an open mind. And I will not allow any preconceived notions I have of Spalding Gray to inform my opinion.
Josh Lefkowitz, writer and performer of Help Wanted, has made plain his admiration for the late, great playwright in all publicity for the piece. Now, here we are on our new couch, looking at a small table bearing the weight of a tasteful tablecloth, a small bottle of water, and about 30 or so pages of unbound typing paper. These items are heavier than they seem, for they carry with them the weight of a man's life—Gray's entire career and body of work. Lefkowitz better be ready to do some heavy lifting, I think to myself.
The strength of Lefkowitz's arms is not the concern here. He hefts a very heavy text on his own and even makes note of weightlifting in the piece. The instant shock of the first several minutes of the piece is that it is performed entirely within the modus operandi established by Gray, author of such well-known monologues as Swimming to Cambodia. Is this imitation or homage? I find myself, as Lefkowitz does many times in the script, asking myself, What would Spalding do?
In Help Wanted, the author details the story of his script's creation. In the two years leading up to its writing, we follow Lefkowitz through a couple of dead-end jobs, his 20th birthday on Sept. 11, 2001, and eventually a move to Washington, D.C., that results in his first legitimate employment as a working actor. At the story's climax, Lefkowitz comes face to face with his great hero, Gray, just months before the latter's death. Lefkowitz's own story and writing evidences the strengths that he praises in his mentor's work. Help Wanted carefully skirts "the balance between specificity and universality."
As a performer, Lefkowitz crackles on every page and every line. Whether he is embodying characters (like his girlfriend, his parents, and even Gray himself) or chanting a self-composed "Geena Davis" empowerment mantra, he radiates an air of relaxation and calm, a charming eye at the center of his hurricane-like coming of age story.
While reliving the familiar college exercise of writing a research paper in an hour, Lefkowitz openly admits that academic miracles of that nature occur only through "plenty of plagiarizing." On a broader level, he is addressing the question at the forefront of any audience member's mind: Is Help Wanted a justifiable work of plagiarism? Has Lefkowitz swiped Spalding Gray's medium (just as a critic might imitate Gray's monologue style when reviewing this show) to further his own career? That's what I was thinking when I left Dixon Place at around 9:30 that night.
On the way to the 6 train, we stopped at Botanica Bar on Houston Street so I could use the bathroom. Jenn noted that my choice of restroom was funny. On many nights we have visited Botanica. In fact, Botanica is where I took Jenn to introduce her to my friends for the first time, two of whom had decided they would get married on the bench just outside. Botanica is familiar territory in the sprawling, uncharted and unnumbered streets downtown.
It was there, in a haven of comfort on Houston, that my opinion of Lefkowitz's piece cemented itself. As a first-time writer, he is testing the waters of storytelling in a familiar pool. It is clear in the text and performance of Help Wanted that Gray taught him how to swim. Based on the precision and clarity of his strokes, the strength of Lefkowitz's craft should take him to Cambodia and beyond in the years to come.
When you go to an Off-Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare, you can usually count on the script being good, even if the production is weak. When you go to a show performed in a bar, you can usually count on the crowd being good, even if the production is sloppy. But with Twelfth Night: The Drinking Game, returning after a sold-out run last March at the Slipper Room, you can actually count on the evening being good, even if the production isn't polished. The Legitimate Theater Company has hit on a new and innovative way to bring the Bard to the people: make it bawdy, make it fun, and give the people plenty of excuses to drink. The space they've chosen, a bar with an adorable proscenium at one end, is just small enough to allow for lightly microphoned performances but large enough to hold an audience and a separate drinking area. The audience is split into teams and is cued (by a blue card, a red card, or two "flipped birds") when to drink. Then the tale of mistaken identities, gender reversals, and (appropriately enough) drunken revelries plays out, with much consumption of alcoholic beverages.
The surprising thing about the show, besides how well suited it is to the gimmick, is that there were some adventurous takes on roles that are usually cut-and-dried (and often dry). Sir Toby Belch, normally played as a ridiculous old boozehound, is portrayed by Jordan Smith as a harmless, aging frat boy. His partner in crime, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, has been transformed from a cowardly fop into a dim good ol' boy, with Jesse Wilson breathing new life and conviction into every line in a very likable performance.
Kent Meister's Orsino works a sexy/sleazy angle that appeals to the feisty Viola, disguised as his manservant Cesario. But Orsino's behavior with the guys is far different from his fawning conduct toward the mourning Olivia (Morgan Anne Zipf), who doesn't go for him. Viola (Megan Sara Kingery), desperate for her master's approval, sets about wooing Olivia for Orsino, but Viola's ardent speech and indifferent attitude make Olivia fall for Viola's male persona.
There are more outrageous and modern-day tweaks to the text. The relationship between the leather-clad sailor Antonio and pretty boy Sebastian (whom Antonio saved from drowning) is more intimate than avuncular. Maria (Molly Pope) is more slutty wench than saucy handmaiden. Oh, and most of the male characters seem to be almost equally interested in the same sex as in the opposite one. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
This is a very physical, sexual show, with any subtle naughty references made abundantly clear. The staging is frenetic, with the actors sitting in front of the audience and jumping on and off the stage for their cues. Their energy and passion for the material is infectious, and even if the second half is slowed down by plot machinations and a near absence of drinking cues, the performers managed to win over the audience by the end.
For drinkers, this show might bring them to the theater more often. And for theatergoers, it might bring them to the bar more frequently.
No matter how they are reinvented, there are certain elements of the best-known Greek tragedies that are simply unavoidable. We hear their names and immediately make associations. The familiar story of Medea, the mother who murdered her children to punish her husband Jason for leaving her, is no exception. Yet La MaMa's current production of The Medea, conceived and directed by Jay Scheib, makes admirable strides in changing our concept of the play by addressing not just its emotional content but its structure as well. Performed in reverse chronological order, this Medea pays homage to the modern detective novel and attempts to circumvent the audience's anticipation of the play's end and instill a fresh sense of suspense in the text. As a means to a cataclysmic end, Scheib uses this method, as well as such multimedia as operatic live music and edgy video, to heighten moments in the play that often get overlooked.
Frequently successful and always engaging, The Medea provides a new way of looking at a classic. Though sometimes confusing and tangential, this Medea takes a bold look at a succession of small events and how they add up.
At the start of the show, the nurse, who throughout the play acts as a meditative and horrified observer, stands at the back of the stage. The set that the audience sees consists of a dark mess of chairs, brick walls, and a large mirror. There is also a haphazardly constructed, ceilingless room onstage.
Michael Byrnes's scenic design offers an interesting contrast of environments and action. The inside of the room, visible only through video cameras that selectively broadcast the room's happenings on two large onstage monitors, is usually a calm, warmer place than outside onstage. Lined with a panoramic picture of tropical islands, the room offers a respite where music is played and where Medea can gather her thoughts. One of the most interesting moments, when Medea seduces Jason one last time in a violent, graphic sex scene, is simultaneously coupled with images of the nurse and Medea's sons smiling and eating apples with casual enjoyment in the room.
Mostly, though, the scenes evolve simply. Interestingly, with the Medea myth stripped of its natural progression, its moments come in short bursts, and the most powerful moments are revealed not by Jason or Medea but by the character whose perspective comes the closest to being comprehensive: the nurse. Played by Aimee McCormick, the nurse stands bent and in awe of the happenings around her. Though the chronology is reversed, one senses that the nurse understands the ominous nature of each moment.
This is a privilege that is taken away from Zishan Ugurlu, who plays Medea with a series of slow-burning stares and violent, physical outbursts. Without the play's natural build, this Medea loses her decision process and feels falsely violent.
One of the most provocative and surprising elements to surface from this spin on Medea's family relationships is the reaction from her sons, played by Dima and Oleg Dubson with alarming, heavy-eyed detachment. Their laissez-faire attitude toward the chaos around them and their willingness to comply with the biddings of their disturbed mother are at once hilarious and horrible to watch. The consistency with which the sons move through each scene, as if not caring about what their eventual ends might be, is bizarrely intriguing.
The Medea is well acted and very interestingly conceived. Scheib's detective-story format provides an unusual method of building suspense and drawing focus to perhaps overlooked moments of this epic myth. Yet what he loses in this retelling is the characters' self-reflection, and the motivation behind the chaos.
Edith Wharton
If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then the sketch comics of Saturday Night Rewritten must hold the writers and performers of NBC
The Talking Band
A play about a young man dying of a fatal illness runs the risk of turning mawkish. But Irish playwright Aidan Mathews engages the subject of illness and dying with a refreshing candor and lack of sentiment in Communion, a dark and cerebral comedy of manners that is receiving its American premiere at the Origin Theatre Company. Jordan, whose medical studies were cut short by a brain tumor, has returned to his boyhood home in an upscale Dublin suburb. Lying in a hospital cot in his bedroom, sweet-tempered Jordan is cared for and entertained by his brittle mother, his troubled younger brother Marcus, Marcus
"Have you seen Harry?" his frantic owner Girl (Hannah Wolfe) desperately asks the children in the audience after her beloved dog escapes under the family's white-picket fence to avoid a dreaded, though much-needed, bath. Preschoolers' eyes search the theater in earnest. There are several places Harry could be hiding in the interactive children's village that serves as a stage for Harry's many adventures. Wide-eyed toddlers in the front row stare eagerly at a large, green fire hydrant their hands are itching to touch, while those seated two rows behind them struggle to conceal Harry's dog friends in a game of hide and seek.
Eventually, everyone sitting in the audience will become part of the story in Harry the Dirty Dog, playing at the Manhattan Children's Theatre. The theater, which specializes in staging clever and intelligent plays for toddlers, proudly displays this John Adams quote in its playbill: "I must study politics and war so that my children may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy...in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, and music."
Glancing around a theater decorated with towering cardboard bakeries, banks, and supermarkets that parents and children are encouraged to explore, you realize how touchingly appropriate this quote is for theatergoers of all ages.
In the moments before the show starts, the theater is a virtual madhouse of over-stimulated preschoolers melting from their seats to the floor, spilling juice on nearby scenery, or fighting with their parents in the stands for a snack. However, once Harry the dog, played with captivating energy by Emily Hartford, rolls across the stage howling, barking, and declaring his love for all things smelly, every child looks on in riveted silence. When Harry plays in traffic against the narrator's (Heather Platt) recommendation, she asks the children in the stands, "Can you make sounds like a car horn to warn Harry?" They instantly and passionately oblige.
Their concern for Harry's welfare does not end there. As Harry roams farther from home, the young audience provides him with frog noises, crashing ocean waves, and street-drilling sounds. Still oblivious to danger, Harry happily tromps across railroad tracks as toddlers join the actors in creating a slightly disorderly human train around the village, which they are reluctant to break once the scene ends. In several instances, parents sheepishly leave their seats to pull their spellbound children from the actors' sides to their own.
As Harry's hygiene continues to decline, Hartford's white-Velcro dog suit becomes adorned with brown and black cloth and a scarf made of seaweed. "Tell Harry he's a dirty dog," the narrator encourages the children, who respond in genuine horror; "Harry is a dirty dog!" Their horror is matched by Harry's owners when he returns home so dirty that no one recognizes him. Desperate for his old life back, Harry concedes to getting into the tub as the classic Bobby Darin song "Splish Splash (I'm Taking a Bath)" blasts from speakers.
Harry the Dirty Dog is a truly inspired play, so creative in delivery that even adults can appreciate the art they are witnessing as the story unfolds. The scenery expertly creates the illusion of stepping from the bustling streets of cramped downtown Manhattan into a storybook where everything is colorful and there is enough room on the sidewalk for everyone.
Manhattan Children's Theatre clearly understands the importance of children's theater. It doesn't talk down to its small viewers but instead recognizes and respects them as the young minds that, if properly inspired by such productions, can grow into the actors, writers, poets, and reviewers of tomorrow.
In these troubled times, sometimes the most therapeutic action that you can take is to meet up with a few close friends, share a couple of drinks, and complain about the world to your heart
The Best Sex of the XX Century Sale is a two-hour blur of rear ends squished into fishnet stockings, dime-shop wigs, and shirtless men parading across the Theater for the New City. Best is also a cacophony of every absurd accent imaginable, popular songs turned into crude sexual innuendo, and the horrible hum made by a near-silent audience at a comedic performance.
The show promises to be a review of sexual history across the last hundred years, and it certainly delivers on that. Lissa Moira, the writer and director, uses an auction of sexual tools, artifacts, norms, and abnormalities to satirize our society's obsession with all that is phallic and/or vaginal. She definitely covers the bases. The show is divided into what seems like 250 30-second skits, each of which seems to parody both a popular song and a popular sexual something.
A sexual anything, as the case may be. Moira takes on everything from horizontal flappers to the horrible task some doctor had of checking for Princess Di's, well, virginity. By the end of the show, no sexual stone is left unturned, the effect of which made me woozy.
Best Sex is neither charming nor humorous. The lyrical parodies might be funny when you're drunk off boxed wine, but unfortunately I made the mistake of drinking from the bottle before the show. A rendition of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" with the line "Smoke gets in your schlong" speaks for itself. As does the fact that the biggest laugh during the show's first hour was at a Marlon Brando fat joke.
Maybe the most unforgivable aspect of Best Sex is the length. Two hours starting at 10:30 on a Friday night is fine for, say, a five-course meal, but by the last 20 minutes of this show even the piano player was mouthing to the audience, "I'm so [expletive] tired." Judging by the cast members' drooping eyes (and falling voices), they too could have used a brief intermission. Or at least another chug from the box.
What kept me interested in the show was the exuberant performance of the charming Emily Brownell and the wry humor of "Calypso Man" Miron Lockett. Each time Lockett, with his long dreads, shimmied onto the stage, he seemed to smile ironically as if to say, "And just why, exactly, am I walking back out here?"
I, for one, was relieved that this show did not emit an odor, although I cringe to think of the taste
If you expect a certain ethnicity among the actors at the National Black Theatre in Harlem, drop that illusion right now. Among the multi-talented cast of nine in the Harlem Theater Project
W.H. Auden once mused that the act of murder is the one crime that concerns society as a whole because in that act the injured party is destroyed. Thus, with the victim being deprived of his own voice, it is left to society to speak for him and demand redress on his behalf, whether through punishment or forgiveness. In Georg B
