It was 1935 Warsaw, and a small traveling troop of Jewish actors were playing the shtetl circuit, as they half affectionately, half mockingly called it. They did vaudeville, they did Shakespeare, they did the Bible. Raisel (Donna Murphy) as Moses’ wife: You’re going to do what? You can’t even part your hair! The times are dark and the troop reaches for answers in absurdity: A pogrom is not an easy act to follow.
Michael Halberstam’s chamber music version of Shaw’s Candida is a charming and exhilarating production about male-female relations in earlier days of the battle for women’s sexual freedom. The story is adapted by Austin Pendleton from Shaw’s 1898 version of the play, which he revised in 1930, when post-flapper era so much in society had changed. At the turn of the century, women were even more psychologically and materially dependent on their husbands.
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia plays with truth and illusion and shows how easy it is to be deceived. It sets true intellectuals devoted to search and discovery against glory-seeking scholars who invent convenient truths. Stoppard, as he is good at doing, mixes truth about historical figures with fantasy about their connections with the protagonists in a way that adds to the fascination of the plot.
The struggles of the working class are starkly depicted in David Lindsay-Abaire’s striking portrait of a handful of friends in Boston’s Southie neighborhood. At a time when economic decisions by the government leave millions of workers in the dust, it’s a political as well as social commentary.
Like the wind and rain storm that swirls around him as he wanders lands he once oversaw, Derek Jacobi blows fiercely in fury at his faithless daughters. His face is red almost to bursting in disbelief. His eyes could sear with their gaze. Yet, in Jacobi’s powerful, dominating portrayal in the Donmar Warehouse production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this King Lear’s howling anger at how his royal state has been eclipsed is the other side of a royal flaw. It is the mistake of the self-absorbed and powerful who believe the ingratiating lies of their courtiers. And relatives. Both Lear and his loyal Earl of Gloucester (Paul Jesson, quietly moving in his misery) are outmaneuvered by evil progeny.
Charles Busch’s very funny campy satire of Catholic nuns hits all the bases, extending to a stereotypical Jewish philanthropist, a Da Vinci Code style mystery with a German faux-nun and a brown-robbed monk, and even a detour back to thirties movies about diligent good-guy reporters
Benefactors begins in 1968, during an era when England was building controversial housing projects. It was written in 1984 by Michael Frayn, who two decades later authored Democracy, the powerful recreation of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s early 70s dealings with East Germany. In both cases, in overlapping eras, the personal becomes political, and there is a strong ideological message that expresses Frayn’s general concern about democracy, writ small and writ large.
Personal and family connections are fraught with psychological peril, disappointment, sometimes joy. It’s the stuff of many, even most, plays, films, novels. Bathsheba Doran weaves those strands into a complex web and network that connects and sometimes sustains lovers, friends, parents and children. It is a slim but appealing fabric, made richer by Sam Gold’s smooth, light touch.
Alfred Uhry’s charming, moving play is part of his Atlanta trilogy about Southern Jews in the middle decades of the last century. Through the conflict and then growing warmth between an elderly middle-class white woman and a middle-aged working-class black man, one gets a sense of how human contact can break or at least crack the barriers of color and class. The production is tour de force for Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones.
This is an unlikely melodramatic potboiler about American slavery and a Jewish family in Richmond, Va., that turned its slaves into believers. It’s an unlikely premise in spite of historical documentation, but you no sooner get to the point of accepting one unlikely premise, than playwright Matthew Lopez throws you another. The play is full of action and mystery, secrets and surprises, but is somehow unsatisfying.
Jamie Jackson’s musical satire is the funniest political skit I’ve seen in years and is a highlight of This Ain’t No Tea Party! Jackson, who played one of the multi-characters in the demanding and hilarious The 39 Steps Off-Broadway last year, is a compleat actor. He was one of six performers at this political cabaret sponsored by Laughing Liberally, which promotes progressive politics.
This vibrant rock production about youthful rebellion in the face of a fraudulent society is in the tradition of Hair. But it’s not Hair with the memorable tunes that we still remember decade later; it’s more like MTV. Fast, often driving, and the kind of hard rock of the 28 Green Day tunes that doesn’t much distinguish it from anything else of that genre.
The genius of Oscar Wilde’s skewering of the British upper classes circa 1895 is that his satire is rather gentle, even affectionate, but his pointed steel neatly pierces the targets. In his deft and delightful The Importance of Being Earnest, he manages to get a few licks in at the literary establishment as well. All is done with enormous wit and panache, and not a trace of meanness, owing much to the flawless direction and acting of Brian Bedford.
There’s a touch of the Southern Gothic in many of Tennessee Williams’ plays, and it is usually seasoning in a pungent stew about human relationships, desires, and failings. But The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is overwhelmed by Southern Gothic till it becomes a potboiler, a parody of a melodrama. This production is saved by the extraordinary performance of Olivia Dukakis, whose portrayal of the garish, bullying, self-centered Flora Goforth takes fire and pulls you in till you feel part of the conflagration.
This is a very New York play even if it takes place in Palm Springs, California. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz tells what happens when a New York writer who lives in Sag Harbor (where a lot of New York writers go in summer), journeys west to visit her extremely Republican parents. Extremely means they were friends of the Reagans.
Most of the characters in director August Pendleton’s brilliant staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters live in hazes of self-delusion and despair lit by flashes of hope and bitter disappointment. That could represent the unhappiness of individuals, especially women, who have little ability to change lives without joy. It can also stand for the illusions of the burgers and small-time aristocrats who as a group also saw no future in the moribund society of pre-revolutionary Russia.
The corruption of culture is the theme of this searing and wildly funny satire written by David Hirson in 1991 and, alas, ever more appropriate today. Mark Rylance is dazzling in the role of Valere, a gross, foppish, foolish street performer who threatens the high art of the theater troop directed by Elomire (David Hyde Pierce), a stand-in for Molière, who was a court playwright. It is 1654 in France, and The Princess (perfectly portrayed by Joanna Lumley), the patron of Elomire’s company, insists that he take on Valere, whom she decides is brilliant.
I can’t remember when I’ve seen a play as hokey and charming and full of fun as Brief Encounter. Okay, I take that back. It was The 39 Steps. But not surprising, it is also a spoof of an iconic British film, that one by Alfred Hitchcock. This one is by Noël Coward. If you want to have a very good time, go to this production. But notice the deeper meaning underneath it all.
This engrossing play starts in 1934 Britain, when over a million men worked brutally hard ten-hour days in coal mines at standard survival wages. The back story is that some miners, who started in the pits at 11 and were deprived of education, had prodigious artistic talent. And probably other natural gifts as well, if only they’d had the chance to develop them. We get to see their paintings in this inventive production by director Max Robert that audiences will savor.
Imagine that you are hidden in a corner of Sigmund Freud’s cozy Hampstead study, with a wall of book shelves, a large window onto the garden and a leather chair next to the iconic couch. It’s 1939, King George speaks on the radio, sirens warn people to extinguish their lights to evade the bombs of the Luftwaffe. Freud (Martin Rayner) is being visited by a young Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold) who had satirized him in a book. Their conversation is stimulating, spellbinding.
Maybe it’s because hypocrisy never goes out of style that George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, seems so up-to-the-moment and not in the least dated. This delightful production by Doug Hughes, with the inimitable Cherry Jones as the madam/mother and a stand-out Sally Hawkins as her daughter, Vivie, charms, amuses and instructs. It is a very feminist play. And not to be missed.
Lillian’s Hellman’s account of the greed that tears apart a family is as powerful and compelling today as in 1939 when it opened on Broadway. It takes place at the turn of the last century, but was written at the end of the Depression. It’s about the advance and avarice of predatory capitalism. The little foxes, yapping and biting at each other’s heels, can be found on Wall Street and in corporate America.
Edward Albee is like a painter with a single overpowering theme. For him, it is the searing experience of being an adopted child of parents he hated. In Me Myself and I, a mother names her twin boys Otto (actually OTTO and otto), a way of divesting each of identity, and much later – when they are 28 – tells otto that he doesn’t exist. The play is bizarre, engaging, even amusing, especially when Mother, the blousy, intense, very talented Elizabeth Ashley is on stage.
Michael Frayn’s sprightly 1975 comical satire of newspaper life takes place in the library of a provincial paper. These were the days before computers, when librarians clipped the local papers and folded and filed the stories so reporters could get background on what they were writing. In spite of the title, Frayn’s newspaper library is anything but ordered, and filing by alphabet seems haphazard as well. But the ordered and disordered personalities that pass through among the piled high cabinets provide some comic pleasure as well as a gentle lesson about managing one’s life.
