All in Off-Broadway
Iranian playwright and performer Nassim Soleimanpour’s latest play features a different guest actor at each performance, reading cold from a script fed by the author. This mysterious but sweet, slowly enveloping experience speaks to our shared humanity and breaks down the perceived barriers we erect between people, groups, and nations. Check it out.
Jeremy O. Harris’s scintillating debut play, “Slave Play” at New York Theatre Workshop, is not what you think it is, packing twists, some heavy satire, graphic sexuality, and an important discourse on race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary America. To write about it is to spoil its surprises, but this sold out run will no doubt inspire future productions.
“All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914” is a beautifully moving epistolary oratorio about the remarkable true story of British, French, and German soldiers emerging from their trenches and ceasing conflict on Christmas Eve 1914 to celebrate together. Gorgeously sung by an ensemble of ten men, and keenly structured and staged with gripping immediacy and emotion, this tribute to an unheralded moment in an increasingly forgotten war provides a glimpse of our common humanity at its greatest.
A roundup look at three new Off-Broadway plays: Tom Stoppard’s “The Hard Problem at Lincoln Center Theater; Lauren Gunderson’s “Natural Shocks” at WP Theater; and Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” at Playwrights Horizons.
To mark its 75th anniversary, New York City Center presents a gala production of “A Chorus Line” that is yet another facsimile of Michael Bennett’s groundbreaking 1975 original. Now the amber fossil of musicals, “A Chorus Line” remains genius and powerful, but is long past due for some re-imagination. Maybe next time.
Ming Peiffer’s shattering new play, “Usual Girls”, presented in a world premiere through Roundabout’s Underground series, offers a blistering dramatization of rape culture through the lens of one Korean-American woman’s journey from girlhood to adulthood. Raw, explicit, and joltingly explosive, this is a bold and important new play.
Two world premiere productions of new plays opened Off-Broadway last night, each offering their characters a reflection on their younger selves and their emotional development, conceptions of love, and visions for the future. This is a roundup look at Second Stage’s “Days of Rage” and the Vineyard Theatre’s “Good Grief” (Critic’s Pick!).
Ma-Yi Theater Company presents “Sesar”, a moving solo show of personal memoir smartly written and performed with élan by Orlando Pabotoy. As a young Filipino boy seduced by Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, this play is the sweet and profound story of how that text bonded a son and father together during a time of political strife in Asia.
Two new plays opened Off-Broadway last week that are “teaching plays” meant to instruct the audience and broaden horizons on subject matter otherwise unknown or unexplored by most. Here’s a look at “India Pale Ale” at MTC and Critic’s Pick “Plot Points in Our Sexual Development” at LCT3.
Keen Company’s revival of Adam Gwon’s delightful chamber musical “Ordinary Days” cleanses the soul, lifts the spirit, and reminds you what you love about New York. All four performers in this almost entirely sung show are outstanding as they tell a simple, beautiful, and original story about how small acts and interactions can change lives. This sweet and quietly extraordinary musical is a must-see.
“Midnight at the Never Get” is a cabaret concert mediation on impossible love, revolution, music, and memory; easily the best new musical I have seen this season so far, Sam Bolen gives a knockout performance as a gay cabaret singer recalling his romance in the smoky backroom haze of New York’s 1960s underground nightclub scene. This gorgeous show is not to be missed.
Jocelyn Bioh’s brilliant play “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” is back at the Lucille Lortel Theatre for an encore engagement by MCC Theater; every bit as funny and devastating as it was when I saw it last fall, the play seems to pop and sizzle even more on a second viewing. Check out my review and get tickets now.
