Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.
In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.
We Are Your Robots, composed and performed by Ethan Lipton, is the perfect answer to the question “What do humans want from their machines?” Directed by Leigh Silverman, this musical about artificial intelligence arrives at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center like a breath of fresh air.
When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.
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.
More than heated chess competitions occupies the center of Cándido Tirado’s New York premiere of Fish Men at INTAR, as five men who gather around the chess tables in Washington Square Park maneuver for higher stakes than mere checkmates in a game.
There should be a whole new word for “disheveled” to describe Jeff McCarthy in Kunstler. As William Kunstler in Jeffrey Sweet’s one-act snapshot of the liberal 20th-century lawyer, McCarthy looks terrible, sporting un-manicured sideburns, messy gray hair with Poindexter eyeglasses nestled in it, an awful tie, and a suit that looks like it was rolled around in dirt before curtain. The look reinforces that this legal near-icon wasn’t into appearances, and it jibes nicely with the shambling, authority-challenging portrait McCarthy and Sweet paint. After a strong beginning, Kunstler settles down into wandering monologue, and leaves some vital questions about its subject insufficiently answered. Still, this Kunstler-at-law is lively company.
Orion, a new play by Matthew McLachlan and directed by Joshua Warr, opened on Valentine’s Day, but the theatrical lovefest dishes out more than sweet nothings. Indeed, this playwright’s first full-length production serves up handfuls of hearty truths.
In 2015 the New Group staged Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, a brutal vision of depravity amid the detritus of a wrecked civilization. Now the same company, under the same director, Scott Elliott, is presenting Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a more subdued yet insinuating take on a society heading in the same direction. Yet the atmosphere is vastly different.
With a whole host of traditional plays and musicals available to choose from, it is sometimes refreshing when theater artists in New York City experiment with form. Creator and producer Brett Epstein’s Rule of 7x7 is just that: an experiment in playwriting wherein seven playwrights each declare a “rule” that must be incorporated into each play. These rules range from a word, a line, or a specific stage direction. To intensify the process, the artists involved have just one month to mount these short plays from conception to performance.
Actors Studio member and Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons (Bonnie and Clyde) will direct a rare New York revival of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa (66 East 4th St.) beginning March 9. The production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2005 play is scheduled to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Actors Studio and the 55th anniversary of La Mama. The limited Off-Broadway engagement will run through March 26, with the opening scheduled for March 13 at 7 p.m. For tickets and more information, call the box office at 212-352-3101 or visit www.lamama.org.
Donald Margulies, one of the most accomplished American playwrights, is probably less famous than he should be, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends (2000) and notable achievements such as Collected Stories (1996) and Time Stands Still (2010). It’s unlikely that the shoestring production of Sight Unseen at the charming Access Theater will add significantly to his reputation, but an exceptional cast and astute direction make the quaint, four-flight walkup worthwhile for theater lovers. (An elevator is also available.)
Theater Breaking Through Barriers will kick off its 38th season with the world premiere of The Other Plays: Short Plays about the Otherness in Our Society. The playwrights contributing one-acts are Dennis A. Allen II, Bekah Brunstetter, Lameece Isaaq, Neil LaBute and Tatiana Rivera. The selections explore the themes of race, religion, sexual identity, and social otherness. Previews will begin on March 10 at the A.R.T./New York Theatres (502 West 53rd St., between 10th and 11th avenues). All tickets are $25 and may be purchased by visiting www.TBTB.org.
“Remember that one Thanksgiving when your nearest and dearest sat down for a quiet game of Monopoly, but then your grandma got drunk and revealed a rich tradition of inbreeding? Well, tonight should be something like that…except with a lot more vodka.”
MCC Theater has announced an all-star lineup of performers for its annual Miscast fund-raiser celebrating its 30th anniversary. The performers for this year’s gala include: Tony winners Annaleigh Ashford, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Jennifer Holliday and Kelli O’Hara as well as Tony nominees Stephanie J. Block, Brian d’Arcy James and Brandon Victor Dixon. Miscast, which features performers singing numbers they would never have a chance to (often songs written for the opposite sex), will be held Monday, April 3, at the Hammerstein Ballroom (311 West 34th St.). For tickets and further information, visit mcctheater.org/galamiscast.html.
Yours Unfaithfully, an unpublished, “un-romantic comedy” by Miles Malleson, gives its audience an intimate look at what it could be like to live in an open marriage, in 1933 and now. Mint Theater artistic director Jonathan Bank has unearthed Yours Unfaithfully and is presenting the world premiere.
Damon Chua’s Incident at Hidden Temple, the current offering of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, takes place in 1943 China, a dramatic juncture in East-West political relations and highly promising background for a play. The Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communists, usually incompatible as water and oil, have forged an alliance to resist Japan’s aggression. The two political groups—led, respectively, by Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung—are restive bedfellows, with scant potential for long-term cooperation.
The Cherry Lane Theatre is presenting the Mentor Project's 19th season. Next up at the theater (38 Commerce St.) is Nathan Yungerberg’s Esai’s Table (March 22–April 1), mentored by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Following that will be Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams (April 25–May 6), mentored by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. For information and reservations visit www.cherrylanetheatre.org or call OvationTix at (866) 811-4111.
The Ma-Yi Theater Company’s Peer Gynt and the Norwegian Hapa Band offers a sonic interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s saga Peer Gynt. Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in 1867 as a dramatic poem, and it was staged a decade later with music by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that has become famous. The play touches upon Norwegian mythology and folk tales, and it captures the hard and difficult times of mid-19th-century life in Scandinavia.
The third edition of AdA: Author Directing Author has programmed three one-acts based on the theme of power. This year AdA founders Neil LaBute and Marco Calvani are joined by Spanish playwright Marta Buchaca, with each presenting a play directed by one of the others.
DannyKrisDonnaVeronica is a captivating production about the modern family structure and the often untold truths of being a parent. Playwright Lawrence Dial explores the reality of marriage and life after children. Although it often seems taboo to speak about the visceral feelings of sadness and hopelessness associated with being a parent, Dial’s play explores the dichotomy of being completely enamored by one’s children while harboring feelings of dismay—the joys of having a family as well as those hidden, or rather, silent, moments of losing one’s identity and becoming irrelevant.
Made in China is a decidedly adult musical from Wakka Wakka, a New York–based theater company that prides itself on challenging “the boundaries of the imagination” with “bold, unique, and unpredictable” entertainments. This visually engaging production is performed by a host of black-veiled puppeteers manipulating intricately crafted bunraku-style puppets designed by Kirjan Waage. The script, by Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock (“with help from the Made in China Ensemble”), pushes the boundaries of puppet earthiness with a vengeance—it features puppet nudity, a puppet performing ordinarily private bodily functions, puppet copulation (both human and canine), and a puppet-dragon that has a mind-blowing digestive system.
Back in 1996, Martin McDonagh, a 25-year-old playwright, made a stunning debut with his play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, revitalizing that old war horse, the well-made play. Within a few years, he had several more successes under his belt: A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West joined Leenane to form a trilogy, not to mention his Aran Islands plays, The Cripple of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (a third is still expected for a second trilogy).
Ninety-four years ago, the cast and producer of the Broadway production of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance were jailed on grounds of obscenity. The jury trial that followed—a cause célèbre in New York State court—foreshadowed more protracted, better-remembered litigation regarding the merits of Ulysses by James Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence.
One way in which musical theater rises above and beyond straight drama in its delivery is that song is like a shortcut, overtaking the spoken word, when reaching out and touching its audience. Fans will be pleased to know that I Like It Like That is a new musical that really delivers.
