You are hit by the overwhelming sadness of everyone involved in Hillary Clinton‘s 2008 New Hampshire primary campaign against Barack Obama. Playwright Lucas Hnath and director Joe Mantello create a landscape of utter sleaze and despair. It‘s January. Even the hotel sitting room seems chill and desolate. There‘s one chair and the floor.
This is a feminist theatrical. A very political play. If you don‘t want to go to a lecture about what is wrong with how the US government treats women and minorities, it‘s more interesting to go to a play. Such as “What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s take on how the Constitution is honored in the breach, “rigged” as the copy she carries says. Adult audiences in New York and other liberal enclaves nod their heads, and it‘s a good teaching moment for kids. Higher marks for politics than for drama.
“The Sun” is a popular newspaper for the undereducated British masses. It was a broadsheet started in 1964, then reinvented as a tabloid five years later by the Australian Robert Murdoch and Larry Lamb, a North Englander he named as editor. They were outsiders to the London Fleet Street crowd and felt it.
Jack O‘Brien‘s crisp staging of Arthur Miller‘s iconic 1947 American morality play lays bare the corruption underlying the normalcy of American society. This story of 70 years ago could be easily replicated today. Oh, so easily.
How do you take a 40s musical built around a sexist Shakespeare play and make it delight today‘s audiences? With pizazz and charm, if you are Roundabout Theatre director Scott Ellis. In this version of Cole Porter‘s and the Spewacks‘ “Kiss Me Kate,” the feisty heroine gives as good as she gets, and she and her erstwhile spouse playing Katherine and Petruchio land some good kicks to the others‘ derrieres.
This very funny, clever, often campy satire of black life and stereotypes by Jordan Cooper hits every button, starting with a noisy evangelical church service for Brother Righttocomplain who is being interred because he was murdered by the election of First Negro President of these United States.
Truth and a bit of fantasy. A quite extraordinary play of how generations of an immigrant family create a major financial institution that starts as a southern cotton farming supply shop and ends as a multinational bank whose crash helps bring on the Great Recession of 2008.
The story is contemporary, subtle and surreal. Anne (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert), who has done nothing in life except be a mother, plays out scenarios about her husband, her son and his girlfriend. The very inventive Florian Zeller writes this not as a narrative that moves smoothly through time, but as a time-shifting, repeating replay of the same events. Under Trip Cullman‘s smart, austere direction, it vividly becomes apparent.
A satire about media ought always to be in fashion. The current revival of the film “Network” as a play works brilliantly to skewer corrupt television.
This revival of Sam Shepard‘s satire about the Hollywood movie business doesn‘t hit that mark. Maybe it worked in 1980 when it premiered, but nearly 40 years later, it‘s too over-the-top. Interesting as a piece of the times. The centerpiece is a faceoff between two brothers, one clean-cut Austin (Paul Dano) a screen writer with a mild, almost milquetoast demeanor. The other is scruffy bearded Lee (Ethan Hawke), who once made money with a pit bull in dog fights and talks in either a threat or a sneer.
The backdrop is a full mirror that captures the audience and, above them, a photograph of a plantation mansion. A way of subtly saying this play is also about the viewers. A piano is playing as if for a cotillion.
In Tom Stoppard‘s “Travesties, Dada artist Tristan Tzara cuts up a page of text, throws the fragments into the air, and collects them to make a new work. I had the same feeling about how Stoppard wrote “The Hard Problem.”
It‘s astonishing how the politics of Network and the reason for its success have not changed since the Paddy Chayevsky film was screened in 1976. Nearly fifty years, and the story is still based on the reality that a corrupt upper class screws the middle class and the poor to take for itself the wealth everyone else produces and give others the dregs and the shaft. While the “media” glorifies neoliberalism, theatrical “fiction” is the only mainstream place such ideas are permitted.
This is a play about an important problem for journalism that begins with a trivial arguments over whether the bricks in a building were red or brown. Or maybe what seems like minutae are the building blocks that lead to more serious inventions. As the play by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, Gordon Farrell is based on a nonfiction work about a real fact-checker, Jim D‘Agata, I assume it followed its trajectory.
Bertolt Brecht‘s brilliant 1941 allegory of fascism and the rise of Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is set in a Chicago that appears helpless to ward off gangsters. A good choice since Al Capone ran the mob for so long there in part by paying off police and politicians. In this satire, the gang is taking over the city‘s cauliflower business, strong-arming merchants into making them “partners.”
Brexit, the decision of Britain to leave the European Union, is the setting for a very clever look at the corruption of politicians on all sides. There are arguments for and against doing a “hard Brexit,” meaning with no agreement with the EU. Prime Minister Masters picks members who oppose each other and lies to each. This play begins to be credible!
This stunning play, sometimes surreal, tells the story of Basra, Iraq, in 2007, from the point of view of the people who lived there, the residents and the militias. The main character, Hero (Karen Alvarado, who also directs), is a woman in search of her disappeared husband, Aqeel (Sufi Malhotra), who was a translator for the British. As counterpoint are militiamen who comment on events in an almost comic fashion.
A firetruck circles houses, watching for threats of arson. Inside one home, a lady serves red wine. Her husband comments, “You open a newspaper, another house burned down.” They are days of mistrust.
A woman‘s body stained with blood is on the ground. The maid (a terrific Hannah McClean) in white cap, black dress and stockings, arrives with bloodied hands and apron and holding a knife. Backtrack to see how this scene developed. Author Madeline Gould and director Madelaine Moore keep you on the edge of your seat.
Kurt Vonnegut‘s 1970 surreal satire dissects the extreme alpha male, a 40ish guy who sometime, in his breathing, his grunts and body movement, seems to turn into an ape. It connects machismo to violence to war. It gets a very good production by the Wheelhouse Theater Company, directed by Jeff Wise.
Glen Close is a terrific actress. Too bad she is starring in such a bad play. She makes it worth watching, even if you cringe at Jane Anderson‘s hokey script that walks straight out of television, dumbing down events of the 15th century so viewers can connect as they do to their favorite sit-com. Anderson has done a lot of TV, and we see the result.
It‘s 1981 in Northern Ireland. The body of an IRA militant who disappeared ten years before has been found, preserved in a bog. An IRA chief, Muldoon (the threatening Stuart Graham) is worried how Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), the man‘s brother, will react, because he is a former IRA activist and knows or suspects how the victim died.
“The Nap” is about a championship game of snooker, a game that’s a variety of billiards or pool. The nap is the pile on the surface of the table. But that’s not really what this play is about. That’s only on the surface. Think hokey comic mystery.
Howard W. Campbell, an American-born Nazi propagandist and double agent, served evil too well and good too secretly. That is the subtle moral of the Kurt Vonnegut story adapted by Brian Katz in a fascinating albeit not totally successful stage presentation. Still better than most of what you will see in New York theater at the moment.
Janet McTeer is a charmer with ego as Sarah Bernhardt the greatest actress of the 19th century who performed on the Euro-American stage. And to bring the story up to date, her artistic challenge is a feminist one. We see it as a play within a play, and Theresa Rebeck‘s script sticks closely to reality, except for an affair with French playwright Edmond Rostand, who was a friend but not necessarily a lover.
It‘s a working-class crowd and the talk is of neighborhood, the boundary of their lives. The scene is a bar and music place, the sounds are of the 50s and 60s, the voices are rich and jazzy. I never realized Leiber and Stoller created so many of rock classics, jazzy torch and doo-wap. I didn‘t like this music then: “Gonna Find Her,” “Jailhouse Rock,” the hokey “Poison Ivy.” I like it now. Most of it.
