The fascination of Florian Zeller‘s play about a man suffering from Alzheimer‘s is that it is told from the point of view of the sufferer. I noted early on a very beautiful French desk, and then not long after, it wasn‘t there. Hmm, I thought. What happened to the desk? Then other items of furniture in his apartment weren‘t there.
Or was it his apartment? It seems that his daughter was married and living in London. But no, he was living in her Paris flat, and she was married to someone else. Or was that the case?
Workers solidarity, a labor union, caring about each other may appear a bit old fashioned in this neoliberal era, but Dominique Morisseau shows vividly how that is a lifeline for four people facing the loss of the jobs at a Detroit auto plant in 2008. At a time when the corporate 1% thinks nothing of what closing factories does to workers.
That of course was the year that bankster fraud almost brought down the world financial system and caused business failures that threw millions of people out of work.
Danai Gurira‘s stunning, naturalistic play is about the horror of war with no horror shown, only talked about. It takes place in Liberia during the civil war of the 1990s and 2000s. There is something surreal there. Three women who have been taken as sex slaves by a military commanding officer are so dehumanized, they have no names. They call each other Wife #1, Wife #2, Wife #3, as their only identities.
Yet, there is some solidarity. The older one (Saycon Sengbloh) there 25 years – since she was 12 or 13 — seems beyond outrage; she cares for other girls. Wife #2 (Zainab Jah), about 19, escapes to get a gun and join the army so she can kill men who attack her. She declares, “With a gun, no man can touch you.” Wife #3 (Pascale Armand) is pregnant, naïve, cried at the rape, but sees no way out.
Surprise that a play about a famous homosexual starts with a man and woman cavorting in bed. We see them waist up, she is nude. But we discover that they are just hotel servants, not the main attraction, who is gay and upper class in his tastes. That‘s Oscar Wilde, the playwright whose sense of entitlement probably helped blind him to the dangers of challenging the British upper class hypocrisy that, riven with homosexuality itself, just didn‘t like it displayed so openly. Not in 1895. So, in some ways, David Hare‘s very strong play is as much about class as about sexual choice. Class, of course, plays a role in other Hare plays.
This is one of those emotionally riveting plays that suddenly flips you over as you realize that everything you took for granted is not so. You are quite sure that David Harrower‘s story fits in with your beliefs about men‘s sexual abuse of young girl, until maybe it doesn‘t. Strongly acted by Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels. (Williams is so much better than her bland performance in “Cabaret,” that you don‘t think it‘s the same person.)
In Richard Bean‘s affecting “Toast,” workers in a British bread factory stick together to combat fatigue, danger, insecurity. Bean wrote the play out of his experiences working at a bread factory in Yorkshire when he was 18.
The men work with old machinery that might break down and cause the owner, who is doing no maintenance, to shift production elsewhere. Yet, they endure stoically the danger of getting hurt – someone‘s arm got crushed — because they need the work. We come to see that they also need each other.
“Echoes” is a powerful and intense play that explores the imperialist mindset as it compares the experiences of two women who lived 175 years apart in Ipswich, England, and were each swept up in the murderous rampage of godly imperialist killers. It won a Spirit of the Fringe award in Edinburgh last year and transferred to London.
A little weird, but Sherlock Holmes stories always are. A guy who wants a young employee to cut her hair. And to wear blue. He lives in a castle, of course. Maybe his wife is a lunatic. So the plot thickens. It‘s “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”
Alfred Uhry‘s 1995 play “The Robber Bridegroom” is a hokey, campy amusing fantasy complete with an evil stepmother, a naïve father, and a two-faced hero/villain, Jamie Lockhart (Steven Pasquale) who has, we must believe, a different face when he wears a small marker that indicates a berry stain. All done to the fine and lively sounds of invigorating country music. (Music by Robert Waldman.) And Connor Gallagher‘s very good down-home choreography.
George Bernard Shaw‘s first play, given a first rate performance by The Actors Company Theatre directed by David Staller, establishes the theme of personal morality vs business corruption that would be a signature of his works through the years. He wrote it in 1892. Shaw from the start liked to skewer snobbery. Harry Trench (a naïve but likable Jeremy Beck) and Billy, more formally William De Burgh Cokane, (the unctuous Jonathan Hadley) are British tourists at a hotel on the Rhine. Pretentious Billy flavors his speech with French, and we enjoy the fact that his accent and grammar are dreadful.
In the canon of arts that are little known because they weren‘t created by white men, add an 18th century baroque opera composed by Joseph Bologne, born 1745 in Guadeloupe, the son of a French plantation owner and a slave.
It‘s a charming confection that was designed as a chamber piece, to be performed privately, because the Paris Opera would not accept “a mulatto.”
His father brought him to France at 7 years old to be educated. He was brilliant. And an accomplished fencer, which made him at 16 a chevalier and eased his way into society. At 17 he read in Rousseau‘s “Social Contract” that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” which challenged the existence of slavery.
Think of Jonathan Swift‘s “A Modest Proposal” as if it were designed by corporate consultants figuring out how to dispose of large numbers of people unlucky enough to have contracted a very deadly virus about to go global. Then move to Aaron Loeb’s engrossing bizarre, dark play which posits a related idea that couldn’t be real. Or could it, in principle? Or the lack of it.
For secret project Senna, the major rules would be 1. No power point, 2. Assume the worst, and 3. No N-word. No, it‘s not that N-word, it‘s the other N-word. Consider the system diagram for Collection, Containment, Liquidation and Disposal.
This play is a period piece. The time is close enough to the present that it‘s fascinating but also a little irritating for a feminist. It was written by Hazel Ellis, an Irish actress and playwright in the 1930s. She performed at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and had success with several plays there.
A smart but rebellious kid gets suspended from a Catholic high school in New York City for saying he doesn‘t believe in God. He ends up at the Thomas Moore Preparatory School in Keene, NH, a small boarding school where he will continue to argue about ideas and also still get into fights and scrapes. John Patrick Shanley, the author of this engaging autobiographical play, presents a charming, vivid look back at how a precocious youth, who would become a major playwright, had to navigate the shoals of rigid school thinking and a run-in with a closeted gay teacher who came on to him. (There‘s also a mystery about a student who tried to kill himself.)
The title suggests this play by David Mamet is about a woman, but it‘s really about politics and corruption. And the trendy topic of tax evasion. Al Pacino is in top form in a slightly over-the-top caricature of a character, a portrayal which in this case is warranted. His Mickey Ross is a heavy-New-York-accented probably Jewish character who made big bucks in ways that probably skirted or shattered legality. At least it‘s clear he doesn‘t care much about the law.
Think of “prime” as the second version of something, sort of like the file you download twice, so the second has little 1 after it. Here it‘s not a file, but the vision of a person, maybe a holographic double.
In Jordan Harrison‘s sci fi computer era play about memory, an 85-year-old widow (Lois Smith) talks to the avatar of her late husband Walter (Noah Bean).
John Doyle‘s staging of “The Color Purple” is a hokey take on Marsha Norman‘s dramatization of the Alice Walker novel about a young black woman in a society of predatory black men. Musical vignettes in jazz, gospel, ragtime and blues make this a visual chamber opera rather than a story play. The production numbers are appealing, the performers are very fine, so it works as opera. But as drama, the story lacks subtlety.
In Arthur Miller‘s tragedy of poverty and patriarchy, director Ivo Van Hove strips out the naturalism of sets and real entrances and exits, so you have just the sense of primal actors. Is that why they wear street clothes but go barefoot? To remind us of the natural animal? (Otherwise it‘s an affectation.)
The surreal sense begins with the pinkish light that suffuses the stage when longshoremen Eddie (a riveting and tragic Mark Strong) and Louis (Richard Hansell) appear after a hard day at the docks. There is chorale music in the background. They are in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
A play one could expect to be very silly turns out to be entertaining, largely due to the smart acting of Annaleigh Ashford as a dog and the quirky light touch of director Daniel Sullivan. My companion was an actress who remembers how hard it was in acting classes to play such anthropomorphic characters. Ashford succeeds brilliantly, being at various times pert, bitchy, sexy and – well anything a human could be. But as I thought about that, I had some concerns.
If you take Mike Bartlett‘s “King Charles III” as the possible future, it makes no sense. But if you take it as a story of hubris and betrayal connected to a critique of British elites, it‘s right in the realm of current real-life political theater.
It follows the Shakespearean tradition of plays as grand political dramas. In fact, the actors speak in rhyming couplets and sometimes bear resemblances to the Bard‘s iconic characters.
Theater as investigative reporting or investigative reporting as theater, however you cut it, Mark Thomas, a British TV actor/comedian and activist has created a fascinating show. It‘s by him and about him: how he ran stings that put some illegal arms traffickers out of business or in jail and how he was deceived and betrayed by a “comrade” who turned out to be a spy for BAE Systems, the UK‘s largest aerospace and weapons company. Oh, and one must mention that all of this has led to hearings by a committee of Parliament into corporate spying on British citizens. So, even before the reviews on this theatrical exposé came in, Thomas had won.
Pinter is a wonderful trickster, playing games with the audience as they watch characters on the stage playing games with each other. This one is about memory, or imagining, or both. And the actors — Clive Owen, Eve Best and Kelly Reilly — pull it off and pull the audience in subtly, as if they were hardly trying. Credit director Douglas Hodge getting the mystery right on.
Deeley (Owen) and Kate (Reilly) are a married couple living in the country, a ways from London. Anna (Best) arrives for a visit. But the start is curious. Anna is wearing an elegant cocktail dress with a halter top and open back, very high heels, not what you‘d wear to dinner at the country house of middle class friends.
In this stunning artistic and feminist biography of Elizabeth I, Karen Coonrod tells us what most of us never knew about that 16th-century British monarch. She was first of all very, very smart, in politics. She was also studied and intelligent, poetic in her speaking and writing, and a polyglot – we hear her speak Italian, Spanish, German. She was subtle, but tough when it mattered. From Coonrod’s plays, built from Elizabeth’letters, speeches, poems, and prayers, you feel you are meeting an amazing woman!
The play starts with four gold high ladder-backed chairs set within a red rectangle painted on a black floor.Four woman arrive, in steel gray or silver or black gowns. There‘s a background noise like radio interference, or is it a mob?
Cloud Nine, of course, is that place of ecstasy in the metaphorical sky where love and/or sex takes one.
Caryl Churchill‘s 1979 play is a quirky la ronde set in Africa in 19th-century Victorian times and London in 1979. Except that most of the characters of the second half are the same as the first, played by different actors. And compressing time, the events of Act 2 take place only 25 years later.
The wit of the first part, skewering British imperialism, racism, sexism, makes the cartoon empire and its inhabitants bitingly funny. Director James Macdonald paints the satire with delicate brush strokes.
Desire is a collection of plays by modern writers who base the works on Tennessee Williams short stories dealing with various aspects of sexual desire, beginning with young first love, moving through various aspects of homosexuality, touching on repressed desire, and finishing with a full blown graphic orgasm. Most are at least interesting, a few are stand-outs, and a couple should have been left between book covers. The performances by members of The Acting Company are excellent.
