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.”
Shakespeare’s romance Pericles has washed up at the Doxsee, the Brooklyn home of Target Margin Theater, with all the “outrageous fortune” in the 1607–08 play intact. Clocking in at 105 minutes, this new staging by David Herskovits, though wildly uneven, delivers some limpidly beautiful moments that redeem the production.
Alexander Zeldin’s Love is a remarkably naturalistic and empathetic work about individuals and families experiencing homelessness. The play takes place in an emergency housing facility in London and was created in collaboration with those who have firsthand experience of such a setting. Zeldin writes in a program note that “a crucial step in the creation of Love was meeting these families, visiting their homes over two years, involving them in workshops and rehearsals, and improvising with them on the subjects and scenes in the play.”
Lynn Nottage. Author of a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece (Sweat), another Pulitzer winner (Ruined), a wild phantasmagorical comedy with revealing things to say about the underclass (Clyde’s), a heartrending miniature she also skillfully adapted into an opera (Intimate Apparel), and several others. Who wouldn’t want to see a little-known early work of hers? Not for nothing is Keen Company promoting Crumbs from the Table of Joy as “the Lynn Nottage play you don’t know (yet).”
A sequel to The Importance of Being Earnest? It’s a tall order, given how frequently Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece returns, and how beloved it is. Alice Scovell’s attempt, The Rewards of Being Frank, gets a few things right and several things wrong, and it’s not the strongest production that New York Classical Theatre has ever done. But if you’re curious about what happened to Ernest and Algernon and Gwendolen and Cecily, and are willing to suspend a fair amount of disbelief, you’ll have a decent time.
Last summer the Ruth Stage production of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre at St. Clement’s. The critical responses were uniformly mixed-to-negative, and OffOffOnline’s Charles Wright described it as a “lumbering version” of the play under Joe Rosario’s direction. Now in a “re-engagement,” as the publicity materials describe the current iteration, the production has been substantially recast, and there are a few directorial modifications. While this Cat 2.0 still lumbers, there is a noticeable improvement along with glimmers of fresh insight into the mendacious, caustic, and fiercely combative characters who populate Williams’s Mississippi Delta estate.
Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees is a quirky and ambitious new play that may please some environmentalists and Thoreau-minded folk, but many theatergoers may find it hard to warm up to this work, populated with a dozen characters, many of whom flit in and out of the play in will-o’-the-wisp fashion. Directed by Tina Satter, The Trees investigates the American dream and questions whether stability is possible in a capitalistic world.
The racy, come-hither title of Mark O’Halloran’s 70-minute work disguises a fascinating drama en déshabillé that explores the loneliness that underlies anonymous sexual encounters and a desire by participants to connect more fully than only with sex. Though the conversations follow intercourse, they reveal more about the characters’ lives up to that point than what happens afterward. Staged with simplicity and power by Tom Creed, O’Halloran’s play is thought-provoking, sad, and thoroughly engaging.
An hour into The Best We Could, you realize you’re not watching the play you thought you were. Emily Feldman’s new drama seemed like it was a semi-experimental staging of a cross-country drive during which a grown woman and her dad visit national parks and revisit moments in their lives. Then, all of a sudden, it’s about something very specific beyond the sightseeing, bonding and memories. And the play belongs to a particular category of stories—and that category is not road trips or family relationships or Our Town riffs.
There are music lovers who embrace jazz, some who adore R&B, and others with a penchant for soul. Yet even among these aficionados, how many know that each genre is heavily indebted to gospel music, and to black churches, where ministers and choirs rouse their congregants in praise and in prayer? Mama, I Want to Sing collectively celebrates legendary black singers whose musical roots were embedded in gospel music and who broke through color barriers as performers. It does so indirectly by tracing the life journey of Doris Winter—stage name Doris Troy—an aspiring singer in a gospel-rich choir. The guide through this journey is the DJ/Narrator, played by Vy Higginsen, the real-life younger sister of Doris Winter. She and her husband, Ken Wydro, co-created the script.
In Black Odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley has undertaken an ambitious conflation of Homer’s epic poem with the history of Black people in America. In this lively, overstuffed and often bewildering fantasia, Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) struggles to find his way back to his family in Harlem after a discharge from the war in Afghanistan. He ends up homeless and then in a mental hospital, while his journey is overseen from Olympus by his allies Deus (i.e., Zeus, played by James T. Alfred) and Athena (Harriet D. Foy), and from the ocean by his enemy Paw Sidin (i.e., Poseidon), who is determined to kill him.
The New Place Players’ production of Othello at Casa Clara, a former foundry replete with balconies and staircases, is an unusual, site-specific staging that pulls the audience into the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Makenna Masenheimer directs the 1604 tragedy without a fourth wall, and a limited audience of 50 assures an intimate experience.
Anton Chekhov’s 1895 chestnut, The Seagull, has always been a crowd pleaser. The tale of unrequited love and petty jealousy among egomaniacal adults and self-doubting youths, sown through with treatises on the craft of writing and the purpose of theater, then capped with a dead bird and a tragic ending, has spawned eight Broadway productions over the past century.
Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual, is an adaptation of her 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, which included letters between Ruhl and Max Ritvo, her playwriting student and, shortly thereafter, friend. Ritvo died at age 25, of a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric cancer first diagnosed when he was 16. He graduated from college while undergoing chemotherapy and surgeries, producing poetry and plays and music along the way, becoming a teacher to Ruhl as much as she was to him.
Lizzie Borden, a favorite true-crime subject since long before the genre had that name, is the inspiration behind Fall River Fishing, a new play directed by Eric Tucker and written by two of its cast members, Deb Knox and Zuzanna Szadkowski. Their double duty as playwrights and performers doesn’t fully convey just how much Knox and Szadkowski, along with their three castmates (Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson and Tony Torn), put into the show. It succeeds because of these five deeply invested performances, each actor playing two roles that require them to deliver absurdist, anachronistic dialogue and engage in physical gags like eating—and feeding each other—spaghetti with their hands, sitting on the toilet for an extended period of time and getting splattered with blood.
Becomes a Woman, Betty Smith’s sort-of warmup to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn now premiering at the Mint Theater Company, begins wonderfully. In the sheet music department of a dime store in Brooklyn, circa 1927, 19-year-old Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price)—she shares the name of the heroine of Smith’s beloved novel, though she’s quite different from the Francie in the book—is working as a song plugger, demonstrating the little-known Jerome Kern–Anne Caldwell “Left All Alone Again Blues,” to the accompaniment of piano-playing pal Florry (Pearl Rhein), while friend/co-worker/roommate Tessie (Gina Daniels) looks on. A lively setting, a swell Kern tune, a trio of sassy girlfriends gabbing about men. A first of three acts that promises a friendly nostalgia trip, in the vein of Smith’s much more famous book. Where are we headed?
In the Roaring ’20s and Depression ’30s, women playwrights contributed substantively to the theater, but Black women playwrights’ work went largely unnoticed in the broader literary world. To counter this, Black magazine owners advertised contests to encourage new scripts. She’s Got Harlem on her Mind features three of Eulalie Spence’s four prizewinning scripts: The Starter (1923), Hot Stuff (1927), and The Hunch (1927). These one-act Harlem Renaissance vignettes reflect the everyday lives and cultures of its Black community. They provide a window into the hopes and shattered dreams of Harlem’s inhabitants.
Ronán Noone’s The Smuggler heightens the inherent challenges of the one-person play with rhyming verse. The one-act “thriller in rhyme,” as it is subtitled, is a 9,000-word poem, but solo performer Michael Mellamphy, under the direction of Conor Bagley, clears the hurdles of the challenging form and effectively engages and entertains the audience—all while crafting cocktails and, of course, rhyming.
Samuel D. Hunter creates worlds of complexity and heartbreak in the most banal settings. A Bright New Boise, which premiered in 2010 at The Wild Project and is now making its off-Broadway debut at Signature Theatre as part of Hunter’s Premiere Residency, takes place in the windowless break room of a Hobby Lobby in Boise, Idaho. Under Oliver Butler’s skillful direction, with a strong ensemble and remarkable lead performance by Peter Mark Kendall, Hunter’s characters engage in a desperate search for meaning in ways funny, painful, and devastating.
When Katie Holmes made her New York stage debut in 2008, she was married to Tom Cruise, and paparazzi descended on Broadway for her run in the All My Sons revival. Coincidentally, one of the first things Holmes says in Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is “I can’t go anywhere in public without a hassle.” Holmes portrays a beautiful, famous actress, which sounds like a good fit for her. The role is a bad fit for the play itself, however, as it does not cohere with the other story lines.
A few months ago Merriam-Webster declared gaslighting 2022’s word of the year. It’s a word with origins in the theater—inspired by the title of a 1938 play, which was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Gaslighting returns to the theater with Lucy, Erica Schmidt’s intriguing new drama in which a nanny seems to be playing mind games with the mother who hires her.
