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 Except it’s maybe not so outdated!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.
Beth Malone plays a terrific, gutsy, leftist Molly Brown who started out illiterate in a western mining town, helped her husband strike it rich in a gold mine deal, and instead of joining the nouveau riche, devoted herself to helping the poor, the union activists at her husband‘s mine and the suffragists. Plus, she managed to survive the Titanic.
Arthur Kipps (David Acton), a London solicitor in his 60s, is a man with a story that must be told. In fact, the story has been running in London since 1989. It started in a bar in Scarborough, Yorkshire, moved to the West End, and now it‘s in a bar at the Club Car at the McKittrick Hotel on West 27th Street in New York.
This is a terrific pop/rock morality tale, a soap opera musical for teens to help them understand their parents. Not bad for parents either. It‘s based on the music of Alanis Morrisette, with a book by Diablo Cody and smart direction by Diane Paulus.
Charles Fuller‘s mystery race play, brilliantly directed by Kenny Leon, is still a stunner, nearly 40 years after it debuted on Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Laura Linney creates a fine portrait of a women seeking to pull a life out of a harrowing childhood in a play that unfortunately descends into soap opera.
This riveting 1937 play is a combination of Brechtian social criticism and Ionesco political allegory, both à propos for a surreal story about Nazi era Europe. When he wrote the play, Hitler was in power and the Nuremberg laws in effect. There‘s a sense of Germanic gothic.
Even if you don‘t like rock, you will appreciate Adrienne Warren‘s bravura performance in this feminist story about a woman who puts up with abuse for years and finally throws off her Svengali to become a world-famous singer.
On the menu of this clever, succulent play are the characters who make up the back of a boutique restaurant in Park Slope, a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn where playwright Theresa Rebeck lives. Director Moritz Von Stuelpnagel makes them all eminently real, albeit somewhat New York neurotic in their own ways.
They couldn‘t have picked a better title to describe the leading Democrats and Republicans, one side defending a leader who sets a record for lying and the other doing so more subtly with fakery supported by a Deep State outraged that it can‘t make policy.
I knew Bella Abzug, so my reaction to this play is deeper and more personal than it might otherwise be. I started out wondering how a guy could create the story of a feminist woman. Would this slip into drag?
This is an amazing play. With Robert Schenkkan‘s 2014 “All the Way,” first part of his Lyndon Johnson story, it is among the most important historic American plays.
It could be a Shakespeare play, a tragedy that engulfs a complex, larger-than-life figure. And one who is brought down by his own hubris. The story moves between the civil rights movement and the American war against Vietnam. And because I knew some of the characters, I have strong feelings about it.
Serafina Delle Rose (Marisa Tomei) is traditional and feminist at the same time. And sensual. Traditional means Sicilian earthy, because she and her husband are Sicilians living on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, between New Orleans and Mobile, in an area populated by their countrymen. It is 1950, and they have the sensibility of Sicilian peasants.
Ntozake Shange‘s 1975 play is a dramatized and choreographed consciousness-raising session. This is about blacks, so it includes a lot of race specific cultural facts. It could have been about women of any race or ethnic group. If you were a feminist in the 70s, you were likely in a consciousness-raising group. I was. This was a powerful, visionary play for its time, and it gets a worthy revival at the Public Theater.
In Tracy Letts‘ story of mid-life crisis, Wheeler (Ian Barford) is a guy of 50 who was ditched by his wife and still can‘t figure it out. He has a lot of the traits that should make trendy folks of his age like him. He likes Miles, Coltrane, Ella. Hates rock. Likes Fellini and Bergman. Hates movies made for men with 13-year-old minds. Likes to think of himself as sensitive, viz a photo he took of a child in a hospital years ago. He‘s acceptable-looking, with only a hint of a paunch.
The forbidden is sweet. Especially when it comes to Gerard Alessandrini‘s Forbidden Broadway musical parodies. This is their 37th year, and as some years are skipped, aficionados look forward to them like a vintage Premier Cru. Good music. Check. Clever book. Check. Terrific performers. Check.
I don‘t know what the title means. And I don‘t know what the play is supposed to mean. Other than that Reality Winner is a loser. And so is the “conceiver” and director Tina Satter, who decided that a Q&A with a couple of FBI agents was enough to be a play. About someone with security clearance who downloaded a classified report and sent it to some media. Without telling us what it was about. Or who she sent it to. Or why.
