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Endgame

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Endgame

John Douglas Thompson and Bill Irwin starring in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic masterpiece Endgame: it’s hard to imagine a more appealing combination. Thompson is perhaps the greatest classical actor of his generation, and Irwin one of the world’s premier interpreters of Beckett, as anyone who witnessed his master class On Beckett (which, like Endgame, played at the Irish Repertory Theatre) can attest. The production, anchored in two brilliant performances and under Ciarán O’Reilly’s precise and elegantly understated direction, exceeds even lofty expectations, perfectly capturing the play’s absurd, macabre comedy without sacrificing its haunting bleakness.

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F*ck7thGrade

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F*ck7thGrade

Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade, a queer musical-memoir that marries narrative and song, has returned to the Wild Project for a limited engagement. Directed by Lisa Peterson, Sobule (music, lyrics, and concept) shares her life story thus far, cleverly drawing upon her stultifying days in seventh grade as a jumping-off point to examine her life beyond middle school.

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Sugar Daddy

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Sugar Daddy

Shortly after launching into his solo show Sugar Daddy, Sam Morrison talks about being mugged. The thief, armed with a gun, demanded his cell phone, and Morrison resisted because it had pictures of his late lover Jonathan on it. “I know we just met,” Morrison tells his audience, “but I think we can all agree that was off-brand.” (It’s clear from the audience’s ebullience that they know perfectly well what his brand is. The mostly young crowd in fleeces and pullovers and trainers have been boisterously waiting for him, even drowning out the pre-show music.) “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” explains the comedian. “We’re not known to excel in moments of crisis.”

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

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Anthony Rapp’s Without You

Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.

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Colin Quinn: Small Talk

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Colin Quinn: Small Talk

Colin Quinn, the Brooklyn-born comedian and former anchor of “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live, recently explained in a radio interview that his stand-up routines are designed to satisfy his curiosity about “how people become the way they become.” In his new Off-Broadway show, Colin Quinn: Small Talk, the 63-year-old writer-performer focuses his comedic gaze on Americans bewitched by the Internet and ponders the extent to which their online activities affect society at large.

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Memorial

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Memorial

Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.

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Asi Wind’s Inner Circle

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Asi Wind’s Inner Circle

Asi Wind’s new close-up magic show, Inner Circle, may be the perfect antidote to the midwinter blahs. Wind, a master magician, eschews tricks with traditional playing cards by using ones that hold a mirror up to his audience—patrons write their names with a red or black Sharpie on blank-faced playing cards of standard size and texture, which, once collected, become his single deck for the evening. Wind believes that by having his audience members personalize each card, it makes them one audience before the show begins.

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Solo: A Show About Friendship

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Solo: A Show About Friendship

Solo: A Show about Friendship is comedian Gabe Mollica’s dramatization of wild fluctuations in his luck with friendship and sex. It’s an hour-long backward glance, from growing up on Long Island to the present, triggered by a milestone birthday: “I turned 30,” Mollica tells the audience, “and realized I had no friends.”

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Becky Nurse of Salem

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Becky Nurse of Salem

Becky Nurse of Salem is a showcase for Deirdre O’Connell, long one of the unsung heroines of New York theater. The actress may have won a Tony this year for her performance in Dana H., in which she lip-synched to a recording, but in Sarah Ruhl’s new play the audience is treated to the full O’Connell, including her voice.

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The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes

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The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes

Some people, as students or adults, hear the word “poetry” and run in the other direction. They’re that intimidated, bored, puzzled or whatever by it. Gordon Boudreau obviously understands this, as he has condensed the history of poetry to major highlights and demonstrates just how irreverent and free-spirited one can be with verse in his solo show The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes.

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Events

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Events

Bailey Williams’s Events at The Brick is a wild and woolly comedy that examines the stresses of current workplace culture. It deals with job-related themes—the high demands for productivity, the delusion that one is irreplaceable—in a style that is witty, original, and entertaining. Directed by Sarah Blush, and co-presented by The Hearth, Events doesn’t altogether succeed as a coherent narrative. Nonetheless, it uses the properties of the theater in a deeply poetic and intriguing way.

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

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Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road

For four decades in the mid-twentieth century, Hoagy Carmichael’s melodies enchanted audiences around the world. Despite massive social upheavals, including the Great Depression and World War II, his songs endured. Many, like Stardust, Georgia on My Mind, and Heart and Soul, became classics. The co-creators of Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road lead the audience through those turbulent times as a group of gifted singers and dancers reprise a repertoire of hits that ultimately led to his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971.

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Fiddler on the Roof

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Fiddler on the Roof

Sholom Aleichem, the famous Yiddish writer, satirized and chronicled Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of Tevye the dairyman, perhaps the best remembered of Aleichem’s works, and on which the musical Fiddler on the Roof is largely based, is being reprised by the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene in Yiddish—a production that premiered to acclaim before the pandemic and has now returned.

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The Rat Trap

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The Rat Trap

Noel Coward’s 1918 play The Rat Trap is a combination of a comedy of manners and a tempestuous domestic drama. Coward, was only 18 when he wrote this play, which addresses women’s rights with psychological realism. Despite various youthful gaucheries, his genius is evident, delineating the theme that was to resurface in later works: the impossibility of love in marriage when spouses are competing egoists. Directed by Alexander Lass, The Rat Trap has all the earmarks of a feminist play, even though the term had yet to be coined.

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Sandra

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Sandra

The Vineyard Theatre opens its 40th season with Sandra, an eerie solo show that dips into the murky waters of missing persons and false identities in order to demonstrate how physical disappearance can manifest itself in many forms. A friend will take off, a business will burn down, a spouse will depart, a house will grow bare, and a lover will become unrecognizable. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, and sure enough, given this title character’s unsteady relationship with alcohol, plenty of wine and liquor will also disappear. So much emptiness, but the result is a mostly fulfilling evening of theater.

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Evanston Salt Costs Climbing

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Evanston Salt Costs Climbing

In Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a young woman prone to panic attacks describes her behavior as “spinning out.” That would be an apt term, too, for what the play itself does. Somewhere around the 80-minute mark of the intermissionless 100-minute dramedy, it starts spinning out into surreal antics such as quick replays of the same scene, someone getting pulled underground and appearances by dead people.

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Vatican Falls

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Vatican Falls

Individuals bearing scars of sexual victimization may prefer alternate histories to feel empowered and capable of some control over their lives. Those victims repeatedly denied justice may react more harshly than those receiving swift redress from perpetrators. In Vatican Falls, playwright Frank Avella vividly depicts the struggles, residual scar tissue, and raw anger of survivors of sexual assault by Catholic clergy whom they trusted.

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Catch as Catch Can

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Catch as Catch Can

Riding a risky wave of experimental casting, three Asian-American actors defy gender, age, ethnicity and a law or two of physics in Mia Chung’s comedy-drama, Catch as Catch Can. Without the aid of costume change, and only occasional differences in lighting, the three performers inhabit six closely linked characters, gliding in and out of each.

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You Will Get Sick

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You Will Get Sick

Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick is a surrealist, allegorical play about illness, loss, and human connection. The primary setting is The Big City, in something resembling modernity before cellular phones, though this is also a primeval, mythic world, where giant birds are liable to snatch you up (best to buy “certified bird insurance,” just in case). The characters are blasé about such events, but there’s also an awareness that something isn’t quite right: the play’s unseen narrator notes that “a bird caws outside your window / it’s too tremendous, too prehistoric / too loud for a city this big.”

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Only Gold

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Only Gold

A cast of 20. An original story, not based on a book or movie. Plenty of dancing. Few modern musicals have all these things, and that Only Gold does indicates the breadth of its ambition. Set in Paris in 1928, the show features an ensemble in near-constant motion on an art deco–styled stage with a long, winding staircase whose banister extends into a circular fixture suspended above the stage amid a sky of globular lights. In design and concept it’s a very ambitious project indeed.

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