All in Play
“The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d” makes its imprint in explicitly displaying the tragedy of its titular “revolving cycles” of racism and indifference, and by viscerally depriving the audience of any disconnection between the world of the stage and the world of our lives. With terrific performances throughout, and trenchant treatment of a devastating story and situation, metatheatrical devices cloud its impact, which can be too clinical, but is nevertheless striking.
Jen Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties” at MCC Theater is a blazingly brilliant and uproariously funny new comedy that serves up a giant entrée of pure feminist, queer, intersectional theatre. Smart direction and design, and a stellar cast, make this fresh, original, and urgently-now play a must see of the fall season.
“THE AЯTS” at La MaMa is a stirring world-premiere collage-like piece of multimedia docu-drama recounting the contentious history and debate over public funding for the arts and humanities in the United States. Rousing, informative, and depressing, this is an important piece of argumentative, documentary theatre for these weary times.
The Pond Theatre Company, dedicated to world premieres of plays by Irish and British writers, presents “The Naturalists” anew play by Irish playwright Jaki McCarrick. Even though the pace and tone of the piece varies widely from act one to act two, you won’t find a better acted suite of scenes on any New York stage than the ones here. The Pond is a new theatre company worth keeping your eyes on.
Gingold Theatrical Group presents a new adaptation of Shaw’s “Heartbreak House”. Despite an impressive roster of actors, and a slew of standout performances, a new framing device for the play results in a muddled tone and lack of setting central to communicating the play’s anti-war allegory.
In “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin”, Mr. Felder, a pianist and actor, entertainingly performs a docudrama of legendary composer/lyricist Irving Berlin’s life through song and story. Informative and irresistible, the show does not rely on nostalgia for its success, and Mr. Felder gives a compelling and convincing performance.
The Mint Theater Company resurrects Lillian Hellman’s long-forgotten 1936 play “Days to Come”, which ambitiously—and quite successfully—dramatizes long-simmering personal and social grievances exploding against a backdrop of labor strife in a small Ohio town. Exciting and refreshing, a play easily cast as a period piece is most surprising for how it is not.
The convergence of history and art, and the way stories can capture us, are explored impressionistically in “Fire in Dreamland”, a funny, heartfelt, but ultimately emotionally-thin and mysteriously-drawn new play at the Public Theater. Rebecca Naomi Jones is a standout, but the play contains too many furtive motivations and not enough stakes.
Young Jean Lee makes history as the first female Asian-American playwright with her quietly enveloping play “Straight White Men”; far from the raging jeremiad that many liberal theatregoers no doubt anticipate, this tightly directed and finely acted play is a smart, funny, and surprising look at questions of privilege and identity through the lens of America’s oldest and newest, and soon to be minority, group: straight white men.
Belgian visionary director Ivo van Hove presents a breathtaking and terrifying stage version of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory. Documenting the rise of the Third Reich through the lens of one German family, it is one of the most profoundly unsettling, memorable, and perversely satisfying experiences I have had in the theatre.
Carey Mulligan gives a commanding performance in “Girls & Boys”, but the play is bloated, plodding, and dramatically unsatisfying. Skip it or listen to the audiobook instead.
Tracy Letts’ “Mary Page Marlowe” at Second Stage offers a fascinating, fragmented portrait of one ordinary woman’s journey through life, embodied by six actors in eleven time-hopping scenes. The tension of what happens to us versus what we control haunts the text as Mary Page traverses decades, surfing waves of feminism amidst the shifting roles of women from mid-century America to the present. Mr. Letts, director Lila Neugebauer, and an ensemble cast of 18 create a mosaic that is compelling, if ultimately mysterious.
