All in Play
Drawing from the headlines, in Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Cake” Debra Jo Rupp gives a fantastic, full dimensional performance as a lovable, conservative baker who struggles with the decision to bake a wedding cake for her surrogate daughter’s same sex wedding. Despite a great performance and a gorgeous production, the play contains a dated treatment of its gay characters and their milieu, presenting an incongruous and ultimately flawed portrait of the relevant issues at hand.
“By The Way, Meet Vera Stark”, a smart satire that takes a piercing look at the damage done by early Hollywood representations of people of color, and the legacy that echoes forth today. With a terrific cast and Lynn Nottage’s is incisive and engaging writing, this play is an easy critic’s pick.
Two duos of complementary works recently opened Off-Broadway: “Sea Wall / A Life” at the Public Theater, featuring Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal performing monologues by Simon Stephens and Nick Payne, and Classic Stage Company’s repertory presentation of “Mies Julie” and “The Dance of Death”, two newly adapted works of August Strindberg. This is a short look at each.
“The Light” is an urgent and painful story of revelation, redress, and hopeful reconciliation cued at the intersection of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Tautly and evocatively sketched by playwright Loy A. Webb, this exquisite two-hander starts like a rom-com before embarking on tragic territory, forcing the audience to reckon with its own baked-in biases and assumptions based on race and gender, and to do and be better.
Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano star in Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Sam Shepard’s “True West”. Colorful, cinematic, but slow-paced and cloudy, Hawke and Dano are miscast as brothers, giving wildly different performances that match in energy much too late.
In “Joan”, playwright Stephen Belber ambitiously sets out to tell one, non-linear story of a woman’s life that slowly creates an absorbing and dramatically effective portrait, at once banal and spellbinding. Johanna Day is exquisite as the titular character, supported by two chameleons who play all the supporting roles. The drama is straightforward, and the production taut.
In Jessica Dickey’s new play “The Convent” a group of women participate in a retreat at a medieval convent in the South of France; the play boasts a promising and intriguing setup that is, unfortunately, bungled in execution due to underdeveloped characters and an imbalanced tone.
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.
“Bleach” is an immersive, site-specific solo show about a gay sex worker that is performed for an audience of ten or less in a drafty basement in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The experience is memorable, but the play itself is too safe for its own good.
The Broadway premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy” at Manhattan Theatre Club, finely acted and beautifully told, is transcendent. The very presence of this play on Broadway about a black, queer teenage boy navigating private, Christian Prep school life is seismic, and Jeremy Pope offers a memorable debut in this timely and important work.
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.
Ivo van Hove brings his signature style to an intense and intelligent stage production of Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetic 1976 film “Network”. An easy highlight of the Broadway season, Bryan Cranston gives a Tony Award-worthy performance as news anchor Howard Beale’s descent into a rage-filled demagogue. The message is the medium, and vice versa, in this technically brilliant and thrilling new drama.
