All in Off-Broadway
Trailblazing experimental African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s powerful new play, “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box”, pieces together an anatomy of interracial young love amidst 1940s Georgia, stewing in the horrific inescapability of history, the tragedy of racism, and contradictions of life in the Jim Crow South. Dense, quick, sentimental, angry, and mysterious, this is one new work from a legend worth checking out.
Greg Pierce’s new play “Cardinal” is bland and platitudinous, offering a superficial patina of hot-button discussion about economic and social change with little resolution or ideological point of view; too comfortable and vague, it falls back on easy tropes and says little that is new. Skip this one.
“The Homecoming Queen” by Ngozi Anyanwu is a mysterious and reconciliatory meditation on buried trauma, family history, and liberation into one’s true self through the story of a novelist returning to her native Nigeria to visit with her ailing father and confront ghosts from her past. Thematically taut but frustrating in its opacity, the play is a confident offering from an emerging playwright worth watching.
“Mankind” is a new satire from playwright Robert O’Hara (“Bootycandy”) that tackles gender, reproduction, fascism, and organized religion, but its intriguing and brilliant premise—a future in which women are extinct and men procreate—becomes too diffuse with too many targets.
British artist, actor, and lip-sync master Dickie Beau's "Re-member Me" is a hilarious and heartfelt ode to the very notion of acting and the gift of performance as he remembers and re-members the ghost of Ian Charleson's iconic performance as Hamlet using his signature style of drag-inspired human puppetry.
"After" is theatrical technician and creator Andrew Schneider's meditation on the mundanity of life, certainty of death, and the balance between; dangerous, dream-like, darkly comical, and deeply observational, it features stunning and inventive stagecraft worthy of putting Mr. Schneider on your radar.
In "The Gates", celebrated New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik brings to life stories about New York, writing, marriage, and parenting from his collected essays, weaving a delightful evening that is unexpectedly and refreshingly entertaining, witty, and poignant.
“Bulldozer: The Ballad of Robert Moses”, a new rock musical about controversial urban planner Robert Moses, is confused in both tone and vision, exhaustively repetitive, woefully uninformative, and awkwardly staged. Skip this one, and attempt to read Robert Caro’s gigantic, Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Moses instead.
“Hundred Days” is a beautiful and uplifting concert musical about a musical duo’s love story and resolution to live life to the fullest; long in development, it still needs some time to germinate, but the seeds of greatness—compelling characters, a driving score, and a poignant, big idea—are all there.
“Describe the Night” is an ambitious, epically sweeping new play by Rajiv Joseph that examines the relationship between observation and truth, storytelling and history. Deeply engrossing, complex, and taught, it spins a chilling reality and paints a portrait of the moral ambiguity that plagues modern Russia.
A new production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's masterpiece "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" breathes fresh life into a now-classic musical, reducing the cast to 8 and setting the play in a pie shop. This inventive and thrilling production is a "must see".
“School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” is a must-see this fall season. Uproariously funny, deeply touching, and quietly heartbreaking, it gives a rare voice to young African women on stage, and marks a stunning New York debut for Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh.
