If you want to see a serious, piercing, unforgettable play about America, see Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes.” It could be subtitled “The American Killing Fields.” The expansion of colonial America to the West, its manifest destiny, a myth we’ve all learned in school, was a cover for genocide. The U.S. was built on savagery, a holocaust, the slaughter of Native Americans, and Tracy Letts tells it brilliantly, with Anna Shapiro’s direction emphasizing the banality that covers up horror.
Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” stars a brilliantly effervescent Mikhail Baryshnikov, a fine dreamy Jessica Hecht, talented supporting players, a giant robotic arm topped by a ring-lit camera and a cute scampering robotic dog. And that’s only the half of it, since I saw the in-person play but not the virtual on-line version. Golyak also directed, marshalling good performances and pulling out a plot from what could have gotten lost in a three-ring atmosphere.
Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite is a collection of sitcom sketches that worked in 1968 but a lot less so in 2022. The last about the parents of a young woman terrified of getting married is very funny, the middle extended bit about fans of the celebrity culture is so-so, and the first about an unhappy wife who discovers her businessman husband is having an affair with his secretary is so dated it should have opened with a time lapse warning.
Will Pomerantz’s staging of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” may be small in size, in a space with just a few sticks of furniture and runtime cut from 3 hours to 2, but the conception and production work grandly. The set by Brian Staton is fine and the cutting seems to leave nothing out. Bass, fiddle and guitar set a mood with evocative music by Nancy Harrow.
Martin McDonagh is brilliant at dark surreal comedy. It’s 1963. The brick wall of a prison room. Hennessey (Josh Goulding) is going to be hung/ or hanged. For raping, killing a young girl. He protests innocence; he never even met the girl. The grammar becomes an issue which seems a misdirected concern when one is taking a human life. Hers? Maybe his.
Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. I haven’t seen the play before or the 1983 film. So, I must assume it got the prize for this moment in wartime to tell people that humans have gone through worse times. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction is sometimes so hokey that you think you’re watching TV. But then she goes on target. The play at the end seems to show how the bad son represents the U.S. militarists now threatening America and the world through their “let’s destroy Russia” operation so we can be the hegemons/rulers of the world.
Shaina Taub’s “Suffs” is the play I’ve been waiting for about the too-little talked about struggle for American women’s* right to vote. Asterisk: American white women, but a massive achievement none-the-less. Taub makes clear the internal conflict of the movement’s failure to recognize black women as partners.
D.H. Lawrence’s 1913 “The Daughter-in-Law” is a classical misogynist play. The tired message is that to have a happy marriage, a woman must be subservient to her husband. This holds even if he’s below her in intelligence and ambition and disinclined to better himself by work. She should just move herself down a peg. And mothers are controlling harridans who spoil their sons’ lives if they can.
This version of “Company,” 15 years after the last spare, stylized, sophisticated production, is a a mélange of pop and TV, with obeisance to current diversity rules. The main character is a girl and one couple is homosexual. And sophistication is traded for garish. But Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics are still brilliant.
LSD was supposed to make Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant and Clare Booth Luce burst into gorgeous new worlds, but as James Lapine imagines in this inventive, intriguing musical, it makes them more introspective, calling up pasts they cannot escape. As writer-director Lapine mixes that with their politics, I came away admiring the characters Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton) and Grant (Tony Yazbeck), but had mixed feelings about Luce (Carmen Cusack).
“The Lehman Trilogy” by Stefano Massini appears to be a love song to American capitalism, though if you look carefully, you will see some tarnishings and even betrayals. It starts with Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale), a German-Jewish immigrant, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, nervous in his best black suit and coat.
I thought this was going to be a tacky, yellow press redux of the paparazzi chasing Diana. I was wrong. It is a terrific feminist, anti-royalist story (book by Joe DiPietro) of what happens when a woman, facing a powerful institution (the “Royal Family”), has the gumption to stand up and fight for her dignity.
“Cullud Wattah” by Erika Dickerson-Despenza is billed as about “three generations of black women living through the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,” where community water was poisoned because the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, wanted to save money and in 2014 switched from Port Huron water to contaminated Flint River water. He was backed up by key state and city environmental “regulators.” In quotes, because they didn’t seem to think contaminated water came under their remit. Or lacked the courage to challenge the governor.
In this hokey, schmalzy soap opera about a black maid working for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana, the cast is better than the text. The script is by Tony Kushner – America’s most over-rated unimpressive playwright — who based it on childhood memories. It was first presented in 2003 and it had the same flaws though less glitz, which must have been added to cover up the flaws.
“Fairycakes,” written and directed by Douglas Carter Beane is a clever, often funny, revisionist take on fairy tales Including Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan for kids with a leavening of Midsummer Night’s Dream for grown-ups. All in rhyming couplets. And with a few contemporary takes, including the manipulation of fear and guilt on which families are built.
“Morning’s at Seven” written in 1939 by Paul Osborn, starts out as a small town family story of the innocent 1920s. It’s often comic, but it’s also a serious look at the difficulties and hidden sorrows that afflict people who seem quite comfortable, discontents that begin to dominate as they get older.
There are two good parts to “The Visitor.” The first is when the sallow-faced economics professor (David Hyde Pierce) attempts to educate his students about the worst neoliberal economists of our age (Samuelson, others) though he doesn’t call them that. The second is the professor’s very passionate – no – raging, excoriation of the American political system that condemns many asylum seekers to certain death in the dictatorships they fled, as has in fact been proved. But putting on a good play requires more than being “woke.”
On election eve I went to a political debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for mayor of New York. I had a good time. No, it wasn’t between the two lackluster candidates for mayor 2021. It was a much more exciting, well, much more fun event between the candidates and campaign boosters of Jimmy Walker (Martin Dockery), running for re-election, and Fiorella LaGuardia (Christopher Romero Wilson), seeking to dethrone the crook.
I know Brecht through his iconic plays, “Mother Courage,” “The Threepenny Opera” and more. But I hadn’t heard his poetry, which was often more directly political than the allegorical stage works. In “Brecht on Brecht,” the TBTB company provides those words in an entertaining cabaret style pastiche of talk and song that takes one through his political life and artistic career.
GB Shaw is the doyen of political plays, and when you see them, you have to put yourself back in time to imagine the outrage of the elites. How they railed at his prickling their class oppression of women, by men and the rich, their snobbery and always their hypocrisy. One of the favorites is “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” a 1902 feminist satire of the times given a fine production by the Gingold Theatrical Group. Except it’s maybe not so outdated!
If for nothing else, people should go to this play to see a master actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson create a neighborhood full of characters, giving life and color to each one, beginning with “Nanny,” the den-mother of the crew who ran two boarding houses, one for the violent and the crazy. He is the writer, director and performer of the piece. His change of voice, body language, facial expression for each character is magical.
Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over” is a surreal satiric funny biting clever horrific vision of what life is like for two young black men living in a ghetto whose borders are so fixed they can only dream of getting out, of “passing over,” only one of the meanings of the play’s title.
Ngozi Anyanwu’s play starts out appearing to be a feminist take about a relationship gone wrong. And the first person we see is curiously called “You 1” which means there will be a “You 2.” Perhaps that means the viewers can identify with either or each.
Directed by Patricia McGregor, the play excels in its acting, especially by the brilliant Daniel J. Watts, less in the text which is sometimes gripping, but then unsatisfying for the questions it leaves unanswered.
“Judgment Day” is an enormously clever, funny, a bit profound play by Rob Ulin about a very corrupt lawyer, Sammy Campo (a terrific rotten-to-the-core Jason Alexander). How corrupt? He’s running a child-slave garment operation where kids get fed “healthy” paste, if they do the work.
I remember seeing “West Side Story” at City Center as a high school student in the late 1950s. We all laughed at the Officer Krupke (Danny Wolohan) comic riff by gang members whose satire of pop psychology has them sing, “We are no good because we are misunderstood.” Not so funny now in Ivo van Hove‘s version, with Krupke‘s nasty racism. Krupke holds a gun and aims it at blacks while someone takes his photo with a phone.
