With Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams pay homage to their foremothers in downtown queer performance—collaborative troupes like Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers that produced freewheeling entertainments infused with sapphic sensibilities yet typically without any linear story.
Upon the 1904 opening of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov notoriously fumed, “Stanislavski has ruined my play!” The playwright envisioned his work as a comedy with elements of farce, a stark contrast to the tragic conception of the renowned Moscow Art Theatre director. One wonders what these two artistic giants would think of the current interpretation now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews, this Donmar Warehouse production from London is spare, farcical, interactive, and grooves to an indie-music beat. While purists may scoff at this cheeky approach to Chekhov, this is a Cherry Orchard for our times.
Johnny G. Lloyd’s birthday birthday birthday follows a group of friends throughout the years as they celebrate milestone birthdays that two in their group share. The play begins as Marissa (Portland Thomas) and Clark (Justin Ahdoot) gather for their 21st-birthday party with their friends amid conversations about class, race, sexuality, hopes and dreams—with a helping of drugs, fights, cheating and gossip.
The hazards of embarking on a sexual adventure are weighed up against stagnation in Ken Urban’s Danger and Opportunity. Directed by Jack Serio, this provocative drama invites the audience to dismantle the traditional idea of marriage and take an unexpected journey into love, intimacy, and hope.
Gloaming, Nowhere is variously described as “the world’s first Neo-Appalachian, Afrolachian, Southern Pop Revusical,” a “patchwork kaleidoscopic collage,” and “a musical for people who don’t like musicals.” This show by quadruple-threat J.S. Streible (composer, lyricist, librettist, and sole performer) has landed on the micro-stage of the Huron Room in the basement of Off-Broadway’s SoHo Playhouse after a “multi-state Appalachian tour.” Streible makes no secret that he hopes Gloaming, Nowhere is destined for Broadway.
A dystopian story about environmental catastrophe and death is not necessarily where one would expect to find humor, but Kate Douglas achieves a darkly comic triumph with her new play, The Apiary. The production at Second Stage Theater fires on all cylinders, including Kate Whoriskey’s superb direction and the uniformly stellar cast, who navigate the play’s mixture of absurdity and sincerity with precise and convincing performances.
Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm at the Vineyard Theatre is a nightmare version of an office sitcom, set during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Quirky worker bees perform evil tasks while navigating interpersonal relationships and an ever-present authoritarian state looming over them, in the form of Vladimir Putin’s portrait on the wall and an armed soldier keeping watch. The professional Internet trolls in St. Petersburg, at the benignly named Internet Research Agency, send out vast numbers of tweets and posts using fake accounts—a “mix of celebrities, eggs, fake individuals, and pundits”—to disseminate misinformation. In almost every case, Gancher uses real Russian troll tweets, a documentary reality that makes the set-up even more nightmarish.
The recent revival and reworking of I Can Get It For You Wholesale by Classic Stage Company brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of staging a riveting musical with an unlikable and irredeemable protagonist—in that case, the avaricious garment-industry upstart Harry Bogen. Now composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman showcase their own antihero with the new musical The Connector at MCC, featuring wunderkind journalist Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) as the show’s despicable, win-at-all-costs centerpiece. Daisy Prince, who directs, is credited with having conceived the story.
Those reflecting on history often use a wide brush and focus on major figures to the exclusion of perhaps less renowned but significant players. Hitler, the Nazi war machine, and concentration camps are front of mind as regards World War II in Europe, but how many people remember dissidents and resistance from within Germany? The White Rose, one such resistance group, presented a credible threat to Nazi lies, propaganda, and blind devotion to the Führer. Brian Belding’s White Rose: The Musical is an homage to some of those “good Germans” who risked their lives and paid the ultimate price for defying Hitler and his henchmen.
Whether the 2004 low-budget horror film Saw has left enough of a cultural footprint on the public to warrant a musical parody is for audiences to decide. Saw the Musical, a send-up of the original Saw, with a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and music and lyrics by Patrick Spencer and Anthony De Angelis, certainly doesn’t provide any evidence of it.
There are few theatrical experiences more thrilling than witnessing a new play catch fire and mesmerize an audience. That experience is now to be had at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, where British playwright Ruby Thomas’s airtight 80-minute drama, The Animal Kingdom, is making its U.S. premiere. Tautly directed by Jack Serio, it’s a show that is emotionally gripping and ultimately redemptive.
Shayok Misha Chowdhury's semi-autobiographical Public Obscenities returns to the stage this season at Theatre for a New Audience as part of The Under the Radar Festival. The production explores themes of returning home and complex relationships as a queer Indian man tries to come to terms with his family’s secrets while breaking away from learned behavior.
The main character in Rachel Bonds’ new drama Jonah is not Jonah but Ana, a young woman portrayed from age 16 into her 30s by Gabby Beans, who’s on stage for the entire play. Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) is in only the first third, except for a brief reappearance near the end. The play peaks during those early scenes, which are charming and funny, then gets increasingly talky and disturbing in the post-Jonah scenes.
Histories come in all shapes and sizes and can be chronicled in any number of fashions. Family histories, each unhappy in their own way, may reveal personal pains that turn out to be strikingly universal. A country’s history can be told in terms of its politics, its geographic landmarks, its immigrants. And a people’s history can be reflected in its folk music. Any one of these might make for an engrossing night of theater. But when attempting to combine all three, finding the right balance and weaving a cohesive tale become a tall order. Such is the case with the New Light Theater Project’s production of The Greatest Hits Down Route 66, which finds itself short on songs, long on family dysfunction, and scattered on Americana.
Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is often described as “Chekhovian,” and, indeed, the parallels to The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters are unmistakable: three very different sisters of the O’Donnell family, along with their relations and hangers-on, navigate a collapsing estate, literally and figuratively, and grapple with a questionable family legacy and sense of purpose. Aristocrats is the second installment of the Irish Rep’s Friel Project, following an exquisite production of Translations.
The Wooster Group’s 2017 celebrated production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons” was promoted as a “record album interpretation.” Conceived by Eric Berryman, the multimedia performance gave thrilling urgency and pulsing vitality to a recording from 1965 that featured African American work songs, spirituals, and personal anecdotes from prison. Berryman and The Wooster Group’s current piece is an exploration of Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, an LP that was released by Rounder Records in 1976. While the performance has its share of exhilarating moments, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me is not as stirring as the previous work. It has, regrettably, several of the hallmarks of what is described in the recording industry as “difficult second album syndrome.”
On July 10, 1941, as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children were rounded up and packed into a barn in Jedwabne, a small town in northwest Poland. The locked barn was set ablaze, and everyone inside perished. The pogrom is notable (and controversial) because, unlike similar atrocities in Nazi-occupied cities and villages, the massacre was not carried out solely by officers of the Third Reich or by Soviet nationals. The perpetrators were friends, associates, and neighbors of the Jews with whom they had lived peaceably and side-by-side before the occupation. Although not explicitly about Jedwabne, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class follows the basic outlines of the historical events, and under Igor Golyak’s resourceful and potent direction, the play shows that our most barbarous enemies may indeed dwell among us.
The journey from boy to manhood is fraught with dangers. A superb new play, Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon, underscores this reality as she dramatizes the passage of two teens into adulthood. Directed by Matthew Iliffe, Bacon is both a cautionary tale and an unflinching exploration of masculinity, sexuality, and power. A sold-out production at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it is now part of the International Fringe Encore Series at the SoHo Playhouse.
Toward the beginning of the new solo show Less Lonely, writer and star Jes Tom explains:
Usually when I do comedy, I come out on stage, I do a bit that goes “Hi. I’m Jes, my pronouns are they/them, I like when people call me ‘they,’ it makes me feel less lonely. Like someone can be like, ‘That’s Jes, they’re gonna go smoke a spliff,’ and it sounds like I had a friend.”
