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The Show-Off

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The Show-Off

The tension between a powerful social hierarchy and an unconventional hero, often an underdog, provides a frequent source of mid-20th-century American comedy. The friction arises in Mary Chase’s Harvey, Abe Burrows, Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac, Philip Barry’s Holiday, and Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mr. Roberts. The sympathy for the heroes of those comedies is a foregone conclusion: they are on the side of the angels, as it were. But that’s surprisingly not the case in George Kelly’s The Show-Off, a hard-edged 1920s work admirably revived by the Peccadillo Theater Company. Kelly’s title character, Aubrey Piper, is a great creation, an annoying rascal and a liar, and one waits impatiently for him to get his comeuppance.

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Breeders

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Breeders

Although the slang term for heterosexuals is the title of Dan Giles’s new play, it doesn’t technically apply to the main human characters, a gay couple, but rather to a pair of hamsters that they are looking after. Giles’s amusing and well-acted comedy has a great deal to say about both sexual and parental love; about the open discussion necessary to keep relationships functioning; and about the neuroses that all couples in the animal kingdom experience.

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KPOP

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KPOP

Ars Nova’s KPOP begins with a chorus of glittering young Korean pop performers belting the lyrics “the future’s standing right in front of you.” Indeed, the purported mission of the play’s fictional management enterprise, JTM Entertainment, is to bring K-Pop to American audiences, and the production delivers K-Pop-styled numbers in droves. 

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Pop Punk High sets limited run

Pop Punk High, a new musical by Ben Lapidus and Anderson Cook that parodies and celebrates the pop punk bands of the 2000s, will begin a run of Thursday nights at the Parkside Lounge on Oct. 12 and play through Nov. 30 (except for Thanksgiving).

The show, directed by Felicia Lobo, will be performed at the historic Parkside Lounge at 317 E. Houston St. on the Lower East Side. Pop Punk High tells the story of a high school where everyone is pop punk, it’s always 2006, and there’s never been anything cooler than shredding, pizza, and flipping off your lame-ass parents. The shows will be performed at 8 p.m. and run for 65 minutes. Tickets are available online at poppunkhigh.com or at the door.

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Fucking A

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Fucking A

Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays always speak their own language, but in 2000’s Fucking A the playwright one-upped herself. The women of the play have developed their own semi-secret language called TALK that allows them to hide in plain sight among callous men. It’s as beautiful and elegant an illustration of female solidarity as any in Parks’s work, and indicative of her gift for fashioning skewed worlds that make us see our own world anew. She doesn’t so much pull back the curtain as shoot it through the back wall.

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The Treasurer

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The Treasurer

“Regarding suicide I just don’t have sad emotions,” says Jacob, the occasional narrator of The Treasurer, Max Posner’s deeply felt, sharply observed play about dementia and care-giving. Jacob (a no-nonsense, resentful Peter Friedman) is the hard-as-nails son who, along with Allen and Jeremy, the more accommodating brothers, must take care of his widowed mother, Ida (Deanna Dunagin, who charts a painfully realistic physical and mental decline). By the play’s end, Jacob is as sad as can be.

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Loveless Texas

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Loveless Texas

Inspired by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, Boomerang Theatre Company’s Loveless Texas is a toe-tapping musical comedy set during the early years of the Great Depression. Although many of the characters hold the same names as in the Shakespeare play, the story begins with a twist: Berowne Loveless Navarre (the hugely talented Joe Joseph) and his buddies—Duke Dumaine (Colin Barkell) and Bubba Longaville (Brett Benowitz)—are playboys who travel from New York to Paris. Along the way they do all the things that upstanding young men shouldn’t be doing: chase women, drink liquor and spend the Navarre family money. 

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In a Little Room

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In a Little Room

In a Little Room, a delightful new black comedy by Pete McElligott, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Ten Bones Theatre Company, shows obvious influences of of Albee, Sartre and especially Beckett, but McElligott has his own voice. The play focuses on two primary characters, Manning (Jeb Kreager) and Charlie (Luis-Daniel Morales), who meet in a hospital waiting room on a very bad day. Initially, they try to conduct a whispered conversation to avoid waking another occupant, who is sleeping (David Triacca, who undertakes multiple roles), and then manage to wake him anyway with amusing ineptitude.

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Makbet

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Makbet

It’s always an adventure sitting down to watch Shakespeare. Where will this production send its viewers? To what time period or country? Will it be set in a fast-food restaurant or trying to stay as close to a traditional production as possible? The Dzieci Theatre company has taken a risk with its recent production of Makbet, a gypsy-infused performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Matt Mitler. The play is presented in a shipping container in the back of a junkyard in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Although it is an uncomfortable place to ask audience members to sit, the underlit and claustrophobic quarters alert the audience immediately to the darkness of the play.  

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For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday

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For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday

Poor J.M. Barrie hasn’t had an easy time of it in the 21st century, with the notable exception of revivals of one-acts at the Mint Theater. The 2015 musical Finding Neverland, based on a film, focused on the dramatist’s struggle to find success after failure and the triumphant creation of Peter Pan, his classic 1904 play about the boy who won’t grow up—a play that, by the way, most of Finding Neverland’s audience had probably never seen, since nobody actually stages it. It’s known primarily through the musicalized version from the 1950s that starred Mary Martin, although the Royal National Theatre’s 1997 production, with Peter played by Daniel Evans, now artistic director of the Chichester Festival, and Ian McKellen as Captain Hook, showed the original is still a viable and glorious work.

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The Baroness

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The Baroness

“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.” So says Danish writer Karen Blixen, better known by her pseudonym Isak Dinesen, in her collection of short stories Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny. There is willful ambition in these words, a desire to live out the hunger at the heart of the artist. The Baroness, subtitled Isak Dinesen’s Final Affair, is a Scandinavian American Theater Company production written by Danish playwright Thor Bjørn Krebs, and the play cannot escape its famous protagonist’s obsession with her art. Directed by Henning Hegland, the play opens with Thorkild Bjørnvig (Conrad Ardelius) addressing the audience as the voice of Karen Blixen (Dee Pelletier) plays over him.

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Inanimate

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Inanimate

Theatergoers who blenched at the subject matter of Edward Albee’s 2002 play The Goat; or, Who Is Silvia? will have a slightly easier time if they attend Inanimate, Nick Robideau’s play that opens the Flea’s new home on Thomas Street in Tribeca—but not by much. Robideau's subject matter parallels that of Albee, who wrote about a man in love with a goat. While Albee’s play is grounded in naturalism—the outlandishness of the premise contrasts with the upheaval of an otherwise normal family life—Robideau takes a different and less successful tack, embracing absurdism for a sexual disorder that is already at the fringes of credibility.

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Charolais

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Charolais

There may be no better, or more controversial, example of humankind’s uneasy attempts to shape nature than the cow. When celeb geek Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted that cows are “biological machine(s) invented by humans to turn grass into steak,” avowed vegan Moby took to Instagram to call him an “ignorant sociopath” for making light of the “unspeakable suffering” humans wreak on billions of animals a year. Irish company Fishamble’s genial Charolais at 59E59 mines this same tension for dark humor and pathos, but with a much more intimate beef, between an Irish woman and a French heifer over the man who loves them both. 

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Dream Up Festival continues

Theater for the New City's eighth Dream Up Festival is running through Sept. 17 and features 23 shows, including four fully staged musicals, four shows on LGBTQ themes, five solo shows, a clown show, two with themes of race in America, and one based on visual art. There is also a play in English from Iceland. The festival performances are staggered over three weeks, and the number of performances varies. The complete lineup may be found at jsnyc.com/season/dreamup2017.htm#lineup. Among the highlights is Buskers: The Musical by Mark Tjarks, highlighting stories of New York buskers; Finishing the Suit by Lawrence Aronovitch, a memory play about a tailor who mourns the loss of the two most important people in his life: his lover Jimmy and his most famous client, the Duke of Windsor; and The Woman Illusion by Piper Rasmussen, a solo play about the gallery of ways to be a woman, with settings ranging from a tense job interview to the battlefields of Queen Elizabeth I. 

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The Suitcase Under the Bed

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The Suitcase Under the Bed

The Mint Theater is continuing its commitment to neglected works this summer with The Suitcase Under the Bed, a collection of four one-act plays written by little-known Irish playwright Teresa Deevy. The female playwright, whose work was produced by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre in the 1930s, has been a continued focus for the Mint since the theater company began its Teresa Deevy Project in 2009. 

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MCC Theater reading series scheduled

MCC Theater will launch its 2017 PlayLabs reading series beginning Sept. 11. The plays, which are in development, will be presented at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.). The playwrights featured will be 2017–2018 Tow Playwright-in-Residence Jocelyn Bioh, MCC alumna Amanda Peet, Charise Castro Smith, and MCC Youth Company alumna Lily Houghton. Further readings will be held on Sept. 25, Oct. 2, and Oct. 16; all will be at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale for $15 and include a post-reading discussion and reception with the artists and MCC leadership. For tickets and more information, visit www.mcctheater.org.

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Shaw series sets Crothers play

Project Shaw takes a detour from the plays of George Bernard Shaw for its next reading, at 7 p.m. on Sept. 18 at Symphony Space (95th Street and Broadway). The group will present Rachel Crothers’ 1910 play A Man’s World, which examines double standards in judging men and women’s behavior. Jenn Thompson will direct the evening. The Shaw reading in October will be Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, at 7 p.m. on Oct. 23. In Shaw’s play, a famous lady arrives in a Moroccan port only to be taken captive by a vengeful pirate, but manages to counter his band of freebooters, an Arab army, and the entire U.S. fleet. Tickets for both events are $35 and may be obtained by calling (212) 864-5400 or visiting www.gingoldgroup.com. —Edward Karam

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Chekhov adaptation set for Governors Island

Brave New World Repertory Theatre (BNW) will present The Plantation, a new adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that is set in 1870 Virginia, after the emancipation of the slaves but before the onset of Jim Crow. The immersive production will be staged for 10 performances beginning Aug. 31.

The immersive production is set inside the Commanding Officer’s House in the Nolan Park section of Governors Island. It will be performed at 1:30 p.m. on Aug, 31 and Sept. 1–3, 9, 10, 15, 17, 23 and 24. For reservations for the production, visit bravenewworldrep.org.

“Chekhov’s original story has universal relevance,” says adapter/director Claire Beckman, co-founder of Brave New World Rep. “The Plantation explores the root causes of America’s most pressing social issue with both humor and heart, while telling a story about race in America.”

Up to 70% of the tickets to the production will be distributed free on a first come, first served basis at each performance. Free ferries depart from Manhattan and Brooklyn before 11:30 a.m.; for information on the ferries, visit govisland.com/info/ferry.

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Van Gogh’s Ear

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Van Gogh’s Ear

Whether one considers Van Gogh’s Ear a mixed-media presentation, or, in the parlance of millennials, a mash-up, the production directed by Donald T. Sanders for The Ensemble for the Romantic Century abounds in pleasures, from its stately pace, to the extraordinary musicianship that suffuses it, to the revelations about a painter whose work is well-known, but whose personality less so.

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Come Light My Cigarette

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Come Light My Cigarette

The advertising campaign for Come Light My Cigarette promises a “suspenseful” evening and features a photo of Erikka Walsh gotten up in Sam Spade trench coat and fedora. Indeed, there’s mystery about this mildly noir-ish musical, written and directed by Arnold L. Cohen; but what’s offstage is more provocative than what’s visible in the auditorium of the Theatre at St. Clement’s.

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