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.
In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.
Pony Cam’s Burnout Paradise is a madcap smorgasbord of actions that are tied together by a final aim: complete a number of tasks in a certain amount of time, all while walking on a treadmill. Part performance art, part physical theater, the show opens with four performers—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams—on treadmills under a large screen displaying the words “Warm Up.” A soft, muttering soundscape (created by the ensemble) floats through the air, offering thoughts on greatness—“If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, you should go knocking on its door.”
We are all connected. Nothing is random; things happen for a reason. Be nice to your siblings. These are some ideas one might discern from Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee, but to say the play is a reflection on these—or any other—themes would be far too generous to this massive misfire that tells three different stories, with barely a sentence of realistic-sounding dialogue among them.
Not so much a “he said/she said” as a “he pontificates,” MsTrial marks the playwriting debut of Dep Kirkland, a former prosecutor who obviously has insights to share about the legal system. It’s ironic, then, that a scene set during a legal proceeding is where the play goes awry.
If ever there was a film that deserved to be satirized, it is the 14 men meet 13 women across 10 subplots glorification of romantic, platonic and familial love known as Love Actually. Why it took 16 years for a work such as Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody to arrive on the scene is anybody’s guess, but the timing is right in at least one aspect. ’Tis the season when quirky Christmas musicals dot the Off-Broadway landscape, and this one, with its many flings being flung across five weeks of winter, is as full of holiday cheer as it is overflowing with whirlwind performances and witty pop-culture shout-outs.
Stephen Brown’s Everything Is Super Great presents a group of likable, oddball, and somewhat hapless characters who don’t really fit in anywhere in the suburban Texas world they inhabit, but bond with one another amid unexpected circumstances. The word “great” works in the play as a form of deliberate denial, but also something genuinely hopeful: life is a series of vexations, large and small, for everyone on stage, and yet the characters, and the play itself, search for little moments of meaning and connection.
The sad history of radioactive relationships must, by definition, begin with Marie Curie, the woman who coined the term “radioactivity.” In 1911 the widowed madame had an affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of her late husband. The ensuing scandal, which was uncovered concurrently with the awarding of her second Nobel Prize, nearly cost her her reputation. And while this heated dalliance drives the story in Lauren Gunderson’s instructive new work, The Half-Life of Marie Curie, it is framed by another of Curie’s relationships, the platonic friendship she shared with the electrical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton.
Albert Einstein may be best remembered for hard scientific theories—but a new musical is exposing the humanity that lies beneath the formulas. Directed by Cara Reichel and based on a novel by Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams offers a cerebral exploration into one of history’s most brilliant minds.
Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, a new play by Liza Birkenmeier, is an intriguing slice of life set on a St. Louis rooftop on Friday, June 23, 1983, the night before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. If younger members of today’s LGBTQ community often take for granted the plight of their elders, Birkenmeier’s play bravely imagines what it was like when being gay involved claustrophobic secrets, blind struggle and a stepping into the void to create a reality without social or cultural precedence.
Like The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels, Richard Nelson’s new play, The Michaels, focuses on a family in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a destination that has become for this playwright what Idaho is for the dramatist Samuel D. Hunter. In Rhinebeck, Nelson finds a microcosm of American life, although his primary structural models are clearly the plays of Anton Chekhov. Nelson has had a hand in translating three plays by the Russian master, and Chekhov’s influence is evident in the quotidian concerns of the earlier families as well as this one: it’s the first in a third cycle.
In One Discordant Violin, the music and narration are central to the story, sometimes complimenting each other and at other times riffing on one another. Adapted by Yann Martel (Life of Pi) from his own short story, the play follows the adventure of a single narrator whose journey provokes a meditation on the meaning of life, the Vietnam War, Trump, the real estate mogul, Joseph Conrad’s stories and fastidious use of punctuation, and the lost dreams of youth.
The setting of BrandoCapote, the multimedia performance piece currently playing at the Tank, is a room at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. It is the location in which Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando in 1957 when the star was filming Sayonara. The play hopscotches from 1957 to 2004, the year Brando died, and the hotel also represents, as the program explains, purgatory.
The New Group playbill says Cyrano is “adapted by Erica Schmidt from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.” Schmidt is a distinguished mid-career stage director and author of All the Fine Boys, a gritty, unsettling 2017 drama which, like Cyrano, was given its New York City premiere by The New Group. As “adaptor,” Schmidt has dismantled Rostand’s 1897 masterpiece, reassembling a few of its elements as a streamlined libretto with a prevailing tone of melancholy.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
Enchanted April has been around longer than you think. If you know the title, it’s probably as a 1991 prestige picture, with Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, and a small cast soaking up the Tuscan sun. But it’s based on an old, old novel by one Elizabeth von Arnim, turned first into a 1925 stage comedy, then a 1935 RKO vehicle that did Ann Harding no favors, then the 1991 remake, then a second, enjoyable stage adaptation by Matthew Barber in 2003. All along, it’s curious nobody saw a musical in it: The lush setting, several love stories, and singable emotions might have been ripe material for, say, a 1954 Lerner and Loewe opus. Which is essentially what the adapters Elizabeth Hansen (book and lyrics) and C. Michael Perry (music and lyrics) have attempted—a radically old-fashioned romantic musical.
Despite the title, Barbara Hammond’s futuristic drama Terra Firma is ironically on shaky ground. Having its world premiere at Baruch Performing Arts College, the play is set on an abandoned platform of a country that experience a “Big War” some 50 years earlier. There, three characters have abandoned the mainland and commandeered the site. Sporadically there are explosions on shore—the conflict is apparently not over, or is it?
Lizzie Vieh’s Monsoon Season is being promoted as a “demented romantic comedy,” and it certainly is that—and more. After two years of development at All for One Theater, where Vieh is an artist in residence, and a recent world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Monsoon Season is a strange, funny, and haunting piece, which depicts, with wit and pathos, two lives careening out of control, and yet never takes a condescending or mocking attitude toward its characters.
Games, Henry Naylor’s play about two German athletes in the 1930s, brings to life the challenges and triumphs of Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann, star Jewish fencer and high jumper, respectively, in Nazi Germany. The play follows the women’s development from gifted child athletes through the period when Nazism clouds their futures. Both come from Jewish backgrounds, but Mayer has a non-Jewish mother. Their differing experiences after Hitler’s election and Nazism’s subsequent anti-Jewish restrictions is the meat of Naylor’s two-character play.
Soft Power, the thrilling new musical by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori at the Public Theatre, wears many hats: it’s a funny and touching East-meets-West love story, a postmodern Rodgers and Hammerstein–style book musical with multiple narratives and commentary, and a dazzling celebration of the rhapsodic power of Broadway song-and-dance. But its most potent identity is as a cri de coeur from playwright Hwang on the violence he suffered before the election of Donald Trump and the palpable fear that Trump’s white-supremacist presidency has instilled in non-white Americans.
Matt Williams’s Fear, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, begins with Phil (Enrico Colantoni) dragging 15-year-old Jamie (Alexander Garfin) on stage in a stranglehold. “Why were you at the lake?” Phil demands, in the abandoned tool shed where he takes his prisoner (scenic design by Andrew Boyce). At its best, Fear, soundly directed by Tea Alagić, is propelled by mystery and frayed nerves, with the potential for violence looming. The confrontation is not just between Phil and Jamie, but soon Ethan (Obi Abili) stumbles upon the unusual scene—with Jamie now tied to a chair—and the story of a missing girl in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood becomes about class and cultural conflict.
Greasy fast food certainly takes its toll on the health of Americans, but it’s not usually so direct as death by Fry-O-Later. Such is the grisly fate of Duncan, at the hands of Mac and Pat McBeth, in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Scotland, PA, a musical adaptation of Billy Morrissette’s 2001 film, which was a dark-comic send-up of 1970s Middle America using the plot of Macbeth in a fast-food setting.
It has been five years since the last edition of Forbidden Broadway, titled Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging. (It always did.) The long hiatus, however, hasn’t dulled the ruthlessness of Gerard Alessandrini, the Drama Desk–winning lyricist and director who satirizes a range of theater shows and foibles, often using classic show music with his own deft lyrics. And he has probably never been more ruthless than in Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation. Smart, vicious and superbly cast, it’s sublime.
