A roundup look at three plays that recently opened at three of Off-Broadway’s best non-profit theatre companies: “Continuity” at Manhattan Theatre Club, “Dying City” at Second Stage Theater, and “Nomad Motel” at Atlantic Theater Company.
All in Play
A roundup look at three plays that recently opened at three of Off-Broadway’s best non-profit theatre companies: “Continuity” at Manhattan Theatre Club, “Dying City” at Second Stage Theater, and “Nomad Motel” at Atlantic Theater Company.
A new, immersive Off-Off-Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” makes history as the first to feature a genderqueer actor as Blanche DuBois, but that’s only one reason to see this uncensored and visceral take on an American classic, performed mere feet from the audience and loaded with complex and raw performances. A must-see.
Two new comedies opened Off-Broadway in the last week, Aziza Barnes’ “BLKS” at MCC Theater and Peter Filichia’s “God Shows Up” at the Actors’ Temple; I take a look at each.
The last two play revivals of the 2018-2019 Broadway season could not be more different in the success of their execution. Here I take a look at Roundabout Theatre Company’s sterling production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” (a critic’s pick!), and the abysmal revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This”.
Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” is a depressing form of inept and backhanded fan fiction, the very existence of which is irredeemably sexist. Putting the marriage and choices of one of the most accomplished and celebrated women in American history on stage for yet more public scrutiny is an indignity no male politician would ever face. Great performances aside, this inaccurate and intrusive play’s existence on Broadway feels irresponsible as a matter of civic integrity.
From The Great Depression to The Great Recession, I take a look at a musical and a play that are now unwittingly in conversation with each other some eighty years and fifty blocks apart, from “The Cradle Will Rock” downtown at Classic Stage Company to “The Lehman Trilogy” uptown at the Park Avenue Armory.
Glenda Jackson is ravishing in an otherwise incohesive and uneven “King Lear” by auteur Sam Gold. Ms. Jackson’s captivating storm of a performance, an original score by Philip Glass, and arresting visual and aural moments are highlights. The balance of the cast is uneven, and the play itself rendered as emotionally clinical.
Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn presents a new nondescript production of Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” featuring an athletic use of choreographed movement to summon the emotional charge created by crowd and battle scenes, elevating and sustaining the intensity of the political drama. “Julius Caesar” is hard to get right; TFANA pulls it off with this well-acted, smartly staged, deeply engaging, and flat-out thrilling production.
Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s new play “Do You Feel Anger?” at the Vineyard Theatre is a razor-sharp, whip-smart satire of contemporary workplace culture that is the blissful antithesis of complacent theatre-making, this play serves up a highly digestible, surrealist critique of mores around empathy consciousness, sexual harassment, hyper-masculinity, and female agency that is equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
To see Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” is to participate in an act of resistance, of reclaiming hope for the future by doing the hard work of grappling with the past. Part civics lesson, part memoir, Schreck recounts her formative experience of wrestling with the constitution’s meaning as a teenager through the lens of her adult self, the women in her family, and the bitterly divided nation it serves. It is the most important play of this or any season—an act of profound social consciousness expanding, community building, and democratic participation—and a must-see.
Lincoln Center Theater presents a strange, funny, and somewhat confounding new comedy by esteemed playwright John Guare that is a bizarre romp through the recesses of memory and the meaning of story. Tautly told and energetically performed, the play remains entertaining, though incomplete—a great whale that Mr. Guare has harpooned for audiences to follow in our own “Nantucket Sleigh Ride”.
Isabelle Huppert offers a devastating portrait of maternal sublimation and abandonment in Florian Zeller’s disturbing and disorienting dark comedy, “The Mother”. Under the brilliant direction of Trip Cullman, the play offers a highly theatrical, distorted, collage-like, meditative, and surreal look at one woman coping with an empty nest, a loveless marriage, and a purposeless life. My advice: get tickets if you can. And call your mother.