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Alternating Currents

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A production of Working Theater, Alternating Currents is part historical pageant play, part romantic drama, and part social commentary. As part of the company’s Five Boroughs/One City initiative, Adam Kraar’s play, directed by Kareem Fahmy, evolved from interviews with residents of Queens as part of the company’s mission “to create theater for and about working people.” Currents is set in the present at Electchester, an actual complex of 38 buildings in Flushing. But Electchester’s best days were around its founding by Harry Van Arsdale, a benevolent overlord who walked the grounds following construction in 1949.

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Danger Signals

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Danger Signals

Built for Collapse’s Danger Signals, written by Jen Goma and directed by Sanaz Ghajar, flips back and forth between 2018, 1935 and 1847 to explore “lobotomies, traumatic brain injuries and western culture’s desire to control and colonize,” according to the promotional material for this strange, difficult piece.

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Summer and Smoke

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Summer and Smoke

Classic Stage Company and Transport Group are taking a fresh look at Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Critical estimation of this lyrical drama—the playwright's fourth Broadway outing—has fluctuated since its 1948 premiere. After the original New York presentation, Summer and Smoke seemed destined for obscurity. But Jose Quintero’s 1952 production for Circle in the Square was a triumph and, according to many commentators, marked the birth of Off-Broadway. The current revival, under sure-handed direction by Jack Cummings III, discards the realistic trappings of mid-20th-century American theater and features a nearly ideal cast.

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A Brief History of Women

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A Brief History of Women

Alan Ayckbourn’s latest play, A Brief History of Women, has the recognizable hallmarks of the best plays in his vast repertoire. His knack at dissecting and satirizing British society is unparalleled (Anglophiles will particularly enjoy them, but they’re accessible to all). There is the great British obsession with class, along with Ayckbourn’s distinctive mastery of exits and entrances familiar from The Norman Conquests, Communicating Doors, and the double bill of House and Garden. There’s poignancy, too, since the new comedy—the title is a bit of misdirection—is an homage to one man’s affecting life.

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Judas

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Judas

Robert Patrick, one of the pioneers of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, was a prominent member of the legendary Caffe Cino, which cultivated the talents of playwrights such as Lanford Wilson, William M. Hoffman, Doric Wilson, and many others. Patrick’s The Haunted Host (1964), Indecent Exposure (1966) and The Warhol Machine (1967) all premiered at the Greenwich Village venue, and his play Kennedy’s Children (1975) was a critical hit on Broadway. The Phoenix Theatre Ensemble deserves credit, then, for reviving Patrick’s Judas (written in 1973), under the direction of Craig Smith. Alas, this exceedingly earnest but unremarkable production is not likely to cause a Robert Patrick renaissance.

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Replay

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Replay

“Dodgy prawns,” insists the narrator in Replay, the affecting solo show written and performed by Nicola Wren, were the cause of her violent physical reaction upon hearing of a man’s suicide. It wasn’t pregnancy or anything else. The narrator, a woman police officer (identified only as W in the program), assures the audience that she is made of sterner stuff than to be shaken by the emotional impact of meeting the wife and daughter of the man, who took his life earlier that day. Dodgy prawns: This is her story, and she is sticking with it. As W describes in painful detail the personal turmoil surrounding her visit to the London home, one begins to suspect the prawns may be receiving a bum rap.

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It Came From Beyond

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It Came From Beyond

Like a comet in an irregular orbit, It Came From Beyond has returned to menace Manhattan, bearing down on Off-Broadway while emanating just enough charm and good will to keep from crashing. This sci-fi musical was spawned in 2005 at the New York Musical Festival, then rose again the next year in Los Angeles. Now, back for an oddball run of Tuesday-only performances, it turns out that, despite the threatening title, it has come in peace. And that’s the problem. Meant as an homage to the 1950s and as a parody of that era’s Cold War monster flicks (most obviously, It Came From Outer Space), playwright Cornell Christianson’s script is campy, but not sufficiently outrageous; other-worldly, but not scary. And opportunities to freshen the writing to reflect current political and societal upheaval have gone untaken.

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Trump satire scheduled

A new play about President Donald J. Trump is scheduled for Theater 511 (511 W. 54th St.) beginning April 27 and running through May 19. Transparent Falsehood: An American Travesty stars Ezra Barnes as Trump. Written by Gil Kofman and directed by Richard Caliban, the play is a satire on the current resident of the Oval Office. Others in the cast are Wyatt Fenner as Barron/Jared, Stephanie Fredricks as Melania, Chuck Montgomery as Steve Bannon, and Latonia Phipps as Ivanka. The language is advertised as “consistent with its subject.” Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesdays and 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. For tickets and information, visit transparentfalsehood.com. 

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The Metromaniacs

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The Metromaniacs

The Metromaniacs is an adaptation of an obscure play from 1738 called La Métromanie, written by Alexis Piron—a poet who failed to make it in to the acclaimed Académie Française due to the lewd content of some of his writing. The production by the Red Bull Theater Company, however, is credited primarily to David Ives, who writes in the program note: “The Metromaniacs is a comedy with five plots, none of them important.” That sums up the one hour-and-45-minute farce and is also what makes the play so delightful. It is a classic comedy of mistaken identity, love at first sight, and, well, absolute fluff. 

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King Lear

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King Lear

In 1940 British critic James Agate said of John Gielgud’s King Lear: “I do not feel that this Lear’s rages go beyond extreme petulance—they do not frighten me!” No such reservation afflicts Gregory Doran’s intelligent and well-spoken Royal Shakespeare Company production, which stars Antony Sher as the king—the Shakespearean role that Sher, who last year played Falstaff at BAM, says will be his last.

 

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This Flat Earth

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This Flat Earth

Lindsey Ferrentino’s This Flat Earth joins other recent plays in tackling a hot-button issue: Admissions at Lincoln Center examined affirmative action, and Miss You Like Hell at the Public is entwined with the deportation of illegal aliens, or undocumented immigrants, depending on one’s political leaning. Ferrentino’s chosen subject is gun violence in schools.

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Happy Birthday, Wanda June

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Happy Birthday, Wanda June

The reputation of Kurt Vonnegut nowadays rest on his comic novels—a mainstay of 1960s counterculture. He combined flights of hilarious whimsy with science fiction and sharp satire in works such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). But at the height of his powers, Vonnegut also wrote a Broadway play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June. The play may not be a masterpiece, but the production by the Wheelhouse Theater Company under director Jeff Wise breathes screwball life into it with strong performances and unabashed theatricality.

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The Edge of Our Bodies

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The Edge of Our Bodies

A 16-year-old prep school student takes a train to New York City, spends some time in a bar, encounters odd sexual shenanigans in a hotel room, and struggles with an assortment of inner conflicts. In 1951, J. D. Salinger turned this scenario into gold with The Catcher in the Rye. But, in the TUTA Theater Company’s abstract and lumbering production of a 2011 play by Adam Rapp, these same elements hold little value. With extensive doses of narration broken only by a few unexplainable affronts of noise and light, The Edge of Our Bodies shares a border with the limits of our patience.

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Wicked Frozen

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Wicked Frozen

Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked has played somewhere around 6,020 performances and counting, and last week the show cleared $2.7 million. The newly opened Frozen, despite some dreadful reviews, was at 99.9% capacity. And both musicals—Wicked since its 2003 opening, Frozen via the 2013 Disney animated smash that inspired it—are cultural phenomena, especially among musical-loving teenage girls who respond to the heroines’ frustrations, bonding with other young women (a sister, in Frozen’s case), and their eventual triumph over adversity. Both shows have earworm empowerment anthems that have saturated social media since their premieres, Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” and Frozen’s “Let It Go.” And both would seem ripe for spoofing, of the Forbidden Broadway sort. Who, except possibly their most die-hard fans, wouldn’t want to have a little fun at these monoliths’ expense?

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LGBT pioneer is focus of new work

Dr. John Fryer, a seminal but little-known LGBT civil rights pioneer, is the subject of a the play 217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous, by Ain Gordon, to be presented May 3-9 at the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (450 West 37th St.). Gordon, an Obie award winner, will also direct. 

Before 1972, homosexuality was considered a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The classification was used by government to justify statutes and regulations that marginalized homosexuals. Fryer gave testimony at the 1972 APA annual meeting that led to homosexuality’s removal from the DSM.

Originally commissioned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and underwritten by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the production is presented by Equality Forum, a national and international LGBT civil rights organization. For tickets ($40) and more information on Fryer, visit 217Boxes.com, or call Ovationtix at (866) 811-4111. All performances are at 7:30 p.m. and run for 70 minutes.

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Play on New Deal program set

Hook & Eye Theater will present the world premiere of She-She-She, a new devised play written by Cynthia Babak, from May 19-June 2 at the Mark O'Donnell Theater at the Actors Fund Arts Center (160 Schermerhorn St., in Brooklyn).

She-She-She is inspired by the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and leading black activist Pauli Murray. In the 1930s, Roosevelt championed the “She She She” camps as a New Deal program tailored for women, housed in America’s national parks. Unemployed women from across the country, including Murray, moved away from their homes to gain hospitality and forestry training at the camps from 1933 to 1937.

She-She-She marks Hook & Eye Theater’s fourth devised work. Founded in 2010 by co-artistic directors Carrie Heitman and Chad Lindsey, the Brooklyn-based ensemble creates works using history, myth and science.

Performances will be at 7:30 p.m. May 18–21, 23–25, and May 30–June 2; there are 2 p.m. matinees on May 20 and  June 1.  Tickets are $25 ($15 students and seniors) and may be purchased by visiting hookandeyetheater.com. For more information, call (347) 927-6475.

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No One Writes to the Colonel

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No One Writes to the Colonel

In 1956, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson described a new play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, as “a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” That Churchillian phrase captures the Godot-like inscrutability of No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tien quien le escriba), an early novella by Nobel laureate Gabriel Gárcia Márquez (1927–2014).

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Leisure, Labor, Lust

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Leisure, Labor, Lust

Sara Farrington’s Leisure, Labor, Lust has interesting subject matter—the intersection of class divisions and sexual orientation in the early 20th century—that is rarely explored in American theater. As a subject, the intertwining of sexual desire across class lines underlay The Judas Kiss, David Hare’s 1998 play about Oscar Wilde, but unfortunately Farrington brings little new to the table except the persons on whom she has modeled her characters.

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Old Stock

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Old Stock

Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, a new musical by Hannah Moscovitch and Ben Caplan from Canada’s 2b Theatre Company, is the story of two Jewish refugees fleeing Romania in 1908. Chaim and Chaya Moscovitch meet in an immigration holding facility in Halifax, Canada. Chaim is 19, hardworking, gentle, and eager to start anew—his entire family has been killed in a pogrom. He is also ready to fall in love. Chaya is 24, practical and hard-nosed. She lost the husband of her youth, Yochai, to typhus and, soon after, their child as well.

 

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The Stone Witch

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The Stone Witch

The ups and downs of the creative process are personified as “beasts which must be tamed” in The Stone Witch, a new play by Shem Bitterman. The work is a somewhat convoluted and ultimately contrived attempt to tackle the psychological complexities of creating art. And while Steve Zuckerman’s production is visually and aurally rich, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

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