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.”
What do you get when you throw two struggling souls in search of success together in a high-stakes campaign to rebrand an assertive, middle-aged, ex-pop icon named Regina Comet? You get two talented but anxiety-ridden young men, reaching for the stars and stumbling all over each other in semi-slapstick style. They also search for their own awakened, perfected selves as they strive to create the ideal jingle to launch Regina—and her fragrance line—back into the mainstream.
Back in 1995, the Oscar for Best Live Action Short went to the edgy comedy Trevor. Set in 1981, it chronicles a 13-year-old boy’s suicidal tendencies and homosexual awakening, complete with clueless parents, a worrisome priest and plenty of Diana Ross fanboying. The screenwriter, Celeste Lecesne, would go on to co-create The Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide-prevention nonprofit, as well as to pen and perform the delightful solo show, The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey.
You may remember Soho Playhouse before the pandemic. Located in an antebellum row house just off Sixth Avenue, it often featured solo and Fringe Festival plays in its careworn mainstage theater or cabaret downstairs, its stairwell adorned with framed posters of shows that had played there.
There’s a moment early in Kevin Barry’s darkly comic Autumn Royal, currently running at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, when siblings May (Maeve Higgins) and Timmy (John Keating), both in their 30s in Cork city, Ireland, realize that the current predicament of caring for their psychotic, decrepit, slowly dying father might have no end in sight.
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a world traveler—not by choice, but by conviction. His larger-than-life, highly controversial career caused him to flee Nazism and take refuge in several countries before he was granted permission to settle in the United States. The Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB) production of Brecht on Brecht tracks the playwright’s odyssey using his songs and writings, which include The Threepenny Opera, The Life of Galileo, and Mother Courage and Her Children.
Kitty Warren, title character of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, is a madam with heart, though not the proverbial heart of gold. As a single parent, she’s prepared to spend any amount of money to shield her daughter from society’s censure; but she doesn’t intend to abandon her own lucrative career as a sex worker.
Chasing Jack, by John S. Anastasi, is the story of a man willing to lose it all for the thrill of throwing the die. Dr. Jack Chase (played with boundless energy by Emanuele Secci) is a tireless cardiac surgeon who appears selfless but has one too many skeletons in the closet. The biggest one—a gambling addiction—can no longer remain hidden, and, after losing a patient, he finds himself in court.
The theatrical troupe calls itself Bedlam, and that may be putting it strongly, but they sure do gad about onstage. Bedlam’s latest endeavor, Sarah Rose Kearns’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion, is currently fizzing all over the Connelly Theater stage, offering many diversions—few of them, unfortunately, having much to do with Jane Austen.
The programs handed out at Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, produced by New York Theatre Workshop and presented at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, note that they have been “frozen in time”: they were printed for the play’s original run, which began in March 2020, and are now accompanied by a QR code providing updated information. This new information includes a remount director, Caitlin Sullivan, in addition to the original direction by Rebecca Frecknall.
It finally dawned on me that theater was back in New York City when I was once again in the presence of characters in a Richard Nelson play as they sliced bread, grated cheese, sipped wine, and had conversations that made you feel like an eavesdropper more than an audience member.
Farce, with its antic misunderstandings and confused identities, can polarize audiences. Spectators may either be exhilarated by the pandemonium or left cold. With Merry Wives: A Celebration of Black Joy and Vitality, the sole production of this summer’s Free Shakespeare in Central Park, playwright Jocelyn Bioh gambles that, after a year of societal strife, she can unify audiences by updating William Shakespeare’s rambunctious farce The Merry Wives of Windsor.
If you’ve never watched Friends, the TV megahit that aired from 1994–2004, that wouldn’t preclude you from enjoying Friends: The Musical Parody. It’s hysterically funny, and concisely captures the idiosyncrasies of every one of the six characters who provokes, pairs off with, or parts ways with another.
Many an autobiographical solo show has been born from hardship— growing up closeted, say, or having an intolerable job, or living through a war. Lori Brown Mirabal’s jumping-off point is the complete opposite. It’s right there in her show’s title, Charmed Life: From Soul Singing to Opera Star.
In Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings), the multitalented Jackie Hoffman portrays Ariana Russo, a barely talented amateur actor who is literally and figuratively at the end of her rope. Stuck in the minor role of the ghostly and ghastly Fruma-Sarah, in a community theater staging of Fiddler on the Roof in Roselle Park, N.J., she must spend the first “hour and seven minutes” of the show offstage, strapped in her flying harness and waiting for her cue to soar.
Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec explores the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the immensely talented 19th-century French painter and printmaker, using the sidewalks, doorways, and windows of Greenwich Village as the setting for a “pandemic-friendly theatrical experience.” Live performance, puppetry, music and a short black-and-white film combine to help the site-specific production tell the story of the artist who captured the seamier side of the Belle Époque.
In mid-March, as the novel human coronavirus steamrolled New York City, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater had to pull the plug on Ren Dara Santiago’s The Siblings Play. The production, directed by Jenna Worsham, was nearing the end of previews, with four days to go before opening night.
Jazz artist Nancy Harrow is one of the New York music world’s greatest, though woefully underappreciated, treasures. During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, she was a regular on New York City’s cabaret circuit, singing with figures such as Kenny Barron, Bob Brookmeyer, and Jim Hall. Back then, Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff wrote: “Nancy Harrow is not jazz-influenced or jazz-tinged or jazz-pollinated. She is without qualification a jazz singer all the way.”
The soundtrack as you walk into St. Luke’s ought to provide a hint: it’s American songbook standards, like “In Other Words” and “Fever,” rendered by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, respectively. It primes the audience to expect a retro evening, and Love Quirks, the new musical by Seth Bisen-Hersh (music and lyrics) and Mark Childers (book), while set in the present-day New York of Instagram and Grindr and Twitter, is retro. It wants to be a sweet old-fashioned evening of melody and humor and light romance, and some of the time it succeeds.
The title character in Vivian Neuwirth’s Mr. Toole is John Kennedy Toole, author of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Known as “Ken” to family and friends, Toole died in 1969, more than a decade before his book was published. Neuwirth knew Toole when she was a student at St. Mary’s Dominican High School in New Orleans, where he taught English. “He was,” she says, “an amazing teacher” with a “theatrical flair.”
The work of Austin McCormick, the polymath artistic director and choreographer of Company XIV, may be handily classified as burlesque—costumer Zane Pihlstrom provides more than enough feathers, fringes, and pasties to justify it—but that label doesn’t really fit a production that incorporates dance, opera, pop music, and acrobatics as well. All are on display in his newest effort, Seven Sins.
