Off-Broadway Play Review—Martyna Majok’s “Queens”

Queens

Written by Martyna Majok; directed by Trip Cullman

Performances through December 7, 2025

Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 West 55th St, New York, NY

manhattantheaterclub.com

Marin Ireland and Anna Chlumsky in Queens (photo: Valerie Terranova)

In her sprawling, messy play Queens, Martyna Majok shows real sympathy for and insight into the women—mostly immigrants, living at one time or another in a basement apartment in the eponymous borough—whose relationships, hopes and fears ring even truer now during the second Trump administration than when the play premiered, during the first Trump administration.

Renia, from Poland, runs things, first helping out the (unseen) landlord after arriving then eventually taking over the place herself. Other women drift in and out over the years the play covers (from the months after the terrorist attacks in 2001 to the early summer of 2017), including Pelagiya, from Belarus; Aamani, from Afghanistan; and Isabela, from Honduras. Later, Isabela’s daughter Glenys shows up as well as Inna, a young Ukrainian woman looking for her mother, who left Inna back home for a new life in America, and another woman from Poland, Agata, who gives Renia a surprising update about her family.

Queens opens with a bang—literally, as the newly-arrived Inna confronts Renia on the street and punches her in anger—and soon settles into a realistically belligerent tone, as these women remain on edge even during good times. Personal difficulties, biases, disagreements and misunderstandings rear their heads, and alternating events 16 years apart show that these women are always dealing with external political forces beyond their control.

Majok smartly concentrates on the women as individuals and not as symbols, although the charged atmosphere makes it almost inevitable that soapbox speechifying is included. But the strength and solidarity of the play’s eight women are never in doubt, even as pettiness or insecurity makes them antagonists.

One of those eight appears only in a flashback to Ukraine, just prior to Inna leaving for the U.S. Inna babysits for Lera, who returns home from an evening out trying to impress young American men in the hopes that she can join them in America. Instead, Inna hijacks Lera’s would-be sugar daddy in an implausible scene and ends up being the one to leave Ukraine, although she quickly realizes she’s been conned.

Happily, Majok otherwise keeps contrivance to a minimum and, even if some of what the women face is melodramatic, it often rings true. The production couldn’t be bettered. Trip Cullman directs resourcefully on Marsha Ginsberg’s realistically bedraggled set of the women’s apartment, lit magisterially by Ben Stanton. And the eight performers are splendid, led by Marin Ireland’s stoic Renia; this is a cast so authentic individually and collectively as to bring out the humanity of the play more subtly than Majok. 

Kudos to them for not only mastering difficult Eastern European accents, for the most part, but also learning to speak Polish (Ireland and Anna Chlumsky, as Agata) and Ukrainian (Julia Lester, as Inna, and Andrea Syglowski, as Lera). Despite its faults, Queens is a memorable theatrical melting pot.

Off-Broadway Musical Review—“The Seat of Our Pants” at the Public Theater

The Seat of Our Pants

Adaptation, music, and lyrics by Ethan Lipton; based on the play The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

Choreography by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt; directed by Leigh Silverman

Performances through December 7, 2025

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Shuler Hensley and Micaela Diamond in The Seat of Our Pants (photo: Joan Marcus)

Making Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth literally sing is not an original concept: the last time it was done here, Off-Broadway in 2017, director Arin Arbus interpolated songs by César Alvarez into the high-concept structure of Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning creation, which takes a tongue-in-cheek but also deadly serious look at the Antrobus family from New Jersey (Antrobus means, not surprisingly, “human being” in Greek), whose 5,000-year existence includes a new ice age, a Biblical flood and an end-times world war in each of its three acts. (Wilder wrote it in 1942 during World War II, for context.)

The Skin of Our Teeth is a structural monstrosity—actors address the audience out of character, stagehands join in on the action, and a dinosaur and a mammoth have speaking parts, to name just a few—so adding songs would seem just another formal conceit that mirrors Wilder’s. The playwright heavily borrowed from James Joyce’s last novel, the punning classic Finnegans Wake—another formal experiment that has challenged readers and scholars for decades—to create the indestructible family that lives through both natural and man-made disasters. 

Ethan Lipton—who adapted the play and wrote the music and lyrics of this latest incarnation, retitled The Seat of Our Pants—has kept most of Wilder’s conceits, so when the Antrobus’ maid, Sabina (who becomes a beauty pageant winner stealing the father away from his family in the second act before reverting back to their maid Sabina in act three) addresses the audience at the beginning, the effect is humorous if bemusing. (Wilder shrewdly put dialogue in Sabina’s mouth that would shut down criticism about what he is trying to do with his play.)

Lipton is better at adapting than writing songs, which, with a couple exceptions, don’t deepen the play’s metaphorical, allegorical or literary conceits but instead regurgitate what Wilder’s alternately pointed and ponderous writing has already covered. The Skin of Our Teeth is a long, exhausting evening of theater—and The Seat of Our Pants, also long, is even more exhausting.

Luckily, the always resourceful director Leigh Silverman stages these seemingly random scenes of a family adrift in a world that’s at war with itself with an unerring sense of the theatrical and the metatheatrical. With choreographer Sunny Min-Sook Hitt, Silverman makes movement more telling than Lipton’s songs or even Wilder’s words. On Lee Jellinek’s cleverly pliable unit set—illuminated by Lap Chi Chu’s canny lighting design and Kaye Voyce’s colorful costumes—Silverman creates a world in which the Antrobus clan, on the precipice of extinction, manages to survive the worst of both nature and their fellow humans.

The large cast tackles these brazenly surrealistic characters with aplomb. Shuler Hensley’s Mr. Antrobus is charming in his dumbness, someone who knows men will always lead however unqualified they are. Damon Daunno, as son Henry, is remarkably adept at aping his father’s brainlessness while Amina Faye, as daughter Gladys, effectively embodies a shrewdness her father and brother will never know. Ruthie Anne Miles, as Mrs. Antrobus, sings beautifully (no surprise) and finds an uncomfortably devastating emotional core, especially in a brief scene when she screams in mortal pain over her dead infant son. 

Then there’s the Sabina of Micaela Diamond, a stage natural who, through a miraculous blend of charm, singing chops and comedic smarts, holds this unwieldy show together. 

Off-Broadway Review—Leo McGann’s “The Honey Trap” at the Irish Rep

The Honey Trap

Written by Leo McGann

Directed by Matt Torney

Performances through November 23, 2025

Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, NY

Irishrep.org

Mathis and Hayden in The Honey Trap (photo: Carol Rosegg)

It’s rare that we see such a taut play as Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, made even more unnervingly claustrophobic on the Irish Rep’s small stage. What begins as a memory play about Dave, a former British army corporal whose friend Bobby was killed in cloudy circumstances while both men were stationed in Northern Ireland in 1979, morphs bluntly but inevitably into a cat-and-mouse game between Dave and one of the women last seen with Bobby before his murder.

McGann shrewdly sets up The Honey Trap as a procedural of sorts: 45 years on, young American researcher Emily asks Dave questions about what happened in Belfast. Dave is initially put off because he feels that the right side (the British) has been largely ignored as Emily has spoken to mostly local witnesses. But her questions trigger his memories, which McGann reveals in illuminating flashbacks to Dave and Bobby at a local pub flirting with seemingly interested local lasses Kirsty and Lisa. But when Dave decides to leave the pub early after speaking to his wife on the phone, he convinces Bobby to stay with the women—with horrific results.

That Dave has been living with the guilt of abandoning Bobby is made manifest by his present-day behavior; he quickly snaps at and makes untoward comments about Emily, and—in the most unlikely moment in the play, but McGann needs it to happen so he can get to the second act—hires someone to ransack Emily’s hotel room to get copies of her taped interviews, from which he discovers the identities of the women from the pub. 

Dave finds out that they both went to America, where Kirsty died. But he tracks Lisa down to a café she owns and runs in Dublin, now as Sonia. Although Dave almost too easily gains her confidence, trust and willingness to go to dinner and bed with him after their first date, once they face off as mortal adversaries, McGann writes a breathless and insightful scene of memory, sorrow, forgiveness and revenge, complicating these mentally and morally exhausted individuals.

Matt Torney’s persuasive direction subtly allows the past to bleed into the present and vice versa, by way of Charlie Corcoran’s realistically mobile set, Michael Gottlieb’s authoritative lighting and James Garver’s appropriately chaotic sound design. Molly Ranson (Emily), Daniel Marconi (Young Dave), Harrison Tipping (Bobby), Doireann Mac Mahon (Kirsty) and Annabelle Zasowski (Lisa) are all quite good, while Michael Hayden, as Dave, is properly intense, exasperated or ironical as the situation requires.

But it’s Samantha Mathis, as Sonia—who was an IRA member when barely an adult and is now a soon-to-be grandmother and small business owner, living a dull working-class existence—who gives the play’s most exquisitely moving performance. Mathis owns the second act as soon as he enters, trading flirty barbs with Dave, who comes to her café posing as a dad dropping off his daughter at university. Mathis fully embodies the middle-aged divorcee who has lived a quiet life since she was in the IRA and is now desperate for any kind of excitement. The superbly staged, written and acted stand-off between Sonia and Dave is as riveting as anything I’ve seen in a theater in awhile. 

Off-Broadway Reviews—Two at the Public: John Leguizamo’s “The Other Americans” and Richard Nelson’s “When the Hurlyburly’s Done”

The Other Americans

Written by John Leguizamo; directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Performances through November 23, 2025

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

Leguizamo and Velez in The Other Americans (photo: Joan Marcus)

Actor and writer John Leguizamo cut his teeth on solo shows that opened in small downtown venues and gradually moved uptown to Broadway after he became a known commodity. Those shows—including Sexaholix, Ghetto Klown and Latin History for Morons—feature his dead-on impressions, penetrating observations, juvenile humor and unabashed sentimentality.

For his debut play, The Other Americans, Leguizamo relies on sentimentality. He plays Nelson Castro, a Colombian-American who lives in Queens with his wife Patti and daughter Toni, while their son Nick is returning home from a hospital stay after a mental breakdown. Nelson has inherited the family business of laundromats along with his half-sister Norma, who has done a better job expanding her side of the business than he has. 

Since Nelson has always wanted to be upwardly mobile, he’s sweated blood and tears trying to get ahead, at work and in life. He moved his family out of Jackson Heights and into Forest Hills, which he assumed was a “better” part of Queens for his family. But Patti hated leaving her old neighborhood and friends, and Nick’s bullying began at his new school, which led to his mental fragility. Only Toni seems levelheaded; yet, although she is engaged to Eddie, who works with her dad, she’s considering leaving New York with Eddie to follow her aunt Norma to California and work at building a business out west.

The characters’ interactions and Nelson’s inability to reconcile his personal and professional lives bring to mind Death of a Salesman. He’s no Arthur Miller, but Leguizamo does write funny, even pointed dialogue. Yet, when Nelson’s desperation comes to the surface and it dawns on Patti that he won’t be able to choose his family over his work, the play bogs down in exposition, too-familiar conflicts and a surprising shallowness, culminating in a death telegraphed nearly from the start.

As Nelson, Leguizamo is always watchable, while the many women around him are enacted persuasively by Rebecca Jimenez (Toni), Sarah Nina Hayon (Patti’s friend Veronica), Rosa Evangelina Arrendono (Norma) and, most memorable of all, Luna Lauren Velez, whose Patti is a lively, antagonistic presence.

Trey Santiago-Hudson is game but one-note as Nick, while Trey’s father, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, directs smoothly on Arnulfo Maldonado’s striking apartment set, which ends up more authentic than the characters inhabiting it.

When the Hurlyburly’s Done

Written and directed by Richard Nelson

Performances through September 21, 2025

Public Theater, New York, NY

publictheater.org

A scene from When the Hurlyburly’s Done

With his cycle of plays that chronicled the Apple, Gabriel, and Michael families, Richard Nelson insightfully showed that everyday lives, relationships and conversations can be as artful and compelling as Shakespeare. Wilson’s latest, When the Hurlyburly’s Done, concerns six women who get together after a 1920 performance of Macbeth, the first production of any Shakespearean play in Ukraine. As it is now, war is in the background. 

The play comprises these women talking to one another about their families and their theater work and their  Macbeth director/lead actor, Les Furbas—a real theater eminence from Ukraine, and the (unseen) husband of one of the Macbeth actresses in Nelson’s play, but virtually unknown elsewhere—while they prepare and eat a meal and check on their (unseen) children. As usual for Nelson, two hours onstage equals two hours in these women’s lives, accentuating the feeling that we’re eavesdropping on an intelligent and humorous series of conversations while dinner is being prepared and eaten. The kitchen is filled with talk, laughter, tears, food, and even dance: in other words, real life.

  

Nelson’s writing is never didactic; his chamber dramas double as character studies, delightfully natural dialogue—a la Chekhov—demonstrating that quotidian talk provides as much character dimension as long monologues or showy confrontations. Even when the play stops, so three of the women can practice their scene as Macbeth’s Weird Sisters by performing a dance that gives a glimpse into their relationships with one another and with Shakespeare’s play, it is a wonderfully theatrical moment realized by the actresses and choreographer Charlotte Bydwell.

Too bad When the Hurlyburly’s Done ran only for a week at the Public. It must have been difficult to mount: in a post-performance talk, Nelson said he wrote the script in English and had it translated into Ukrainian, a language he does not speak. The superlative actresses—formidable individually and collectively—only arrived in New York right before the run started, so Bydwell had to plan the sisters’ choreography over Zoom calls. That we got it to see it at all, in its quietly haunting eloquence, is a tribute to the ennobling theater of Richard Nelson.

Shakespeare in the Park Review—“Twelfth Night” at the Delacorte Theater

Twelfth Night

Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Saheem Ali

Performances through September 14, 2025

Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, NY

publictheater.org

The cast of Twelfth Night (photo: Joan Marcus)

My first-ever Central Park Shakespeare production was in 1989: Twelfth Night was a star-studded mess with Michelle Pfeiffer as a ravishing Olivia and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio a winning Viola/Cesario, but the rest was a motley crew including Jeff Goldblum, Fisher Stevens and Stephen Collins. Two decades later, Daniel Sullivan’s soggy 2009 Central Park Twelfth Night at least had a wonderful Anne Hathaway as Viola/Cesario; but tentative performances by Raul Esparza as Orsino and Audra McDonald as Olivia dragged it down. And the inconsistent Shaina Taub musicalization, which was at the Delacorte in 2016 and 2018, was anchored by the dynamic Nikki M. James’ Viola/Cesario.

Saheem Ali’s new production of the Bard’s dazzling comedy of errors, mistaken identities and the vagaries of love also introduces a revitalized Delacorte Theater. Actually, the theater doesn’t look much different, as most of the updating was done to the performers’ backstage digs and the amount of machinery needed for scene changes. (And yes, the nearby restrooms have been given a welcomed makeover.)

What’s onstage is the usual clash of acting styles, hit-and-miss directorial interventions and unnecessary additions to Shakespeare’s script that mark this pleasant evening under the stars—a gorgeous New York night like the one at the performance I attended helps compensate for what’s lacking. 

Ali announces his intentions from the start: at the rear of the stage, huge letters spell out the play’s cheeky subtitle, What You Will, wittily created by designer Maruti Evans and illuminated brightly by Bradley King. The cast walks on- and offstage near the letters, and Ali delivers a few visual puns, as when Sir Toby Belch (a memorably sardonic John Ellison Conlee) walks off saying “Ay?” while pointedly looking at the A in WHAT, and Sandra Oh—an otherwise unaffecting Olivia—lounges near the O in YOU. (A later scene where four characters hide behind a tree that is just four letters spelling TREE is far less felicitous.)

Ali has cut the play to 100 minutes sans intermission, which speeds up the action among the various subplots too quickly, muting the comic and dramatic highlights along with Shakespeare’s brilliantly conceived reveal. Of course, the hijinks of Toby, Andrew Aguecheek (a funny but overdone Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Olivia’s maid Maria (a game Daphne Rubin-Vega) take center stage, with extra doses of would-be hilarity the playwright never thought of: Toby even snorts coke during one of their comic binges.

Malvolio, the self-centered servant whose loss of dignity and nervous breakdown can be blamed on the aforementioned trio, is played sharply by Peter Dinklage, although he only rarely approaches Philip Bosco’s unforgettable turn in the role, the highlight of Nicholas Hytner’s waterlogged 1998 Lincoln Center Theater revival. 

But Ali’s most interesting addition—having the separated twins Viola (the charming Lupita Nyong’o) and Sebastian (one-dimensional Junior Nyong’o, Lupita’s brother) speak Swahili as outsiders in Illyria, actual lines from the play—is marred by them sprinkling the Swahili in their dialogue throughout, so when they speak it to each other upon being reunited at the end it’s not as touching as it would have been if we hadn’t heard it several times earlier. 

Turning Feste the clown into a rapping and singing troubadour, and embodied agreeably by Moses Sumney, is a decent idea, while wrapping up the show with a curtain call in which the entire cast is clad in Oana Botez’ sumptuous, eye-catching costumes is something that can only work at the Delacorte. 

Off-Broadway Play Review—“Gene & Gilda”

Gene & Gilda

Written by Cary Gitter

Directed by Joe Brancato

Performances through September 7, 2025

59 E 59Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, NYC

59e59.org

Jordan Kai Burnett and Jonathan Randell Silver in Gene & Gilda (photo: Carol Rosegg)

The romance of actors Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner is the stuff of showbiz legend. The beloved comedians, who met on the set of the 1982 flop Hanky Panky, had a relationship (and marriage) that ended prematurely in 1989 when Radner died of ovarian cancer. Now, the couple’s time together has been dramatized by playwright Cary Gitter as an accumulation of scenes that resemble both the sketches for which Radner was famous on Saturday Night Live and the alternately silly and memorable comic films Wilder starred in during his ’70s and ’80s heyday. 

Which isn't to say that Gene & Gilda is not entertaining. Gitter has done his homework, and his chronology of their passionate relationship provides moments that are genuinely amusing and, later, touching and tragic. His script also dutifully checks off allusions to—and recreations of—Radner’s beloved SNL characters Lisa Loopner, Candy Slice, Baba Wawa, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella, along with bits from Wilder’s big-screen hits Young Frankenstein and The Producers. The downside is that those riffs on the couple’s greatest hits are ready made for nods and easy laughs of recognition, while the framing device of Wilder being interviewed by Dick Cavett breaks the play into bumpily sitcomish segments that are only partially resolved by director Joe Brancato.

Happily, Brancato has resourceful performers to help smooth over much of the rest. As Gene, Jonathan Randell Silver, although at times simply a superior impersonation rather than a characterization, does a good job of catching the almost offhand neuroticism in the actor’s demeanor. And Jordan Kai Burnett gives a beautifully three-dimensional portrait of Gilda, showing her comic brilliance alongside her endlessly charming innocence. Burnett also handles the various impressions of Gilda’s characters with comic aplomb, never getting hung up even during a whipsaw scene when she speeds through several of them in a crazy sort of conversation.

Silver and Burnett play off each other—and even dance together—well enough to provide an extra dimension to this fateful romance that Gitter’s play sometimes lacks.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Donald Margulies’ “Lunar Eclipse”

Lunar Eclipse

Written by Donald Margulies; directed by Kate Whoriskey

Performances through June 22, 2025

Second Stage Theater at Pershing Square Theater Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Lisa Emery and Reed Birney in Lunar Eclipse (photo: Joan Marcus)

At his considerable best, playwright Donald Margulies has a rare gift for creating characters whose down-to-earth realism makes them iconic, as in Dinner with Friends and Sight Unseen. When he’s at his less than best—as in his latest play, Lunar Eclipse—Margulies is still deft with his dialogue, but there’s something lacking in plotting, exposition and insight.

Longtime married couple George and Em sit in a dark field on their midwestern farm in lawn chairs and discuss their long and winding lives together while watching a lunar eclipse unfold. Margulies rotely sketches their decades-long relationship, as difficulties with childbirth led to adopted children: daughter Mary Ann turned out fine and is living in Denver, while son Tim (“Poor Tim,” Em calls him) became a drug addict. George and Em themselves are similarly perfunctorily sketched out—he’s sullen and quick to anger while she is a consoler and optimist. Indeed, at one point, George berates her for being too cheerful (“the smiley-face act,” he derisively calls it).

That’s not to say that there aren’t couples like this, seeming opposites whose decades together were meticulously cultivated to form a more or less stable family. Unlike in his masterpiece Dinner with Friends, here Margulies’ psychologically acute analysis is less than penetrating. Sure, his crisp, tart dialogue can still reverberate, as in George’s touching monologue about weeping over the death of Belle, the latest in a long line of beloved family dogs. 

But the conceit of the eclipse itself—each segment of the play is prefaced by a description of how far into the eclipse we are, e.g.,” Moon enters penumbra. Penumbral shadow appears”—lacks poetic power, especially when Em spells it out: “Everybody’s got their own sad and messy lives to deal with. What do they need to hear me belly-aching for? My sadness is not unique. It’s the oldest story there is: Eve lost a son. The trick is not to let it take over. Cast its shadow over everything else. Like an eclipse.”

Still, as enacted by Reed Birney and Lisa Emery, George and Em become vivid and immediate, even in a strained epilogue that shows them on their first date—a solar eclipse, naturally. Director Kate Whoriskey’s understated direction, on Walt Spangler’s marvelously evocative set, rarely lets their talk go slack—but Amith Chandrashaker’s often resourceful lighting doesn’t mirror the ongoing eclipse. George and Em’s intimate drama would benefit from such moodier shading, especially from its talented creator.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Caitlin Saylor Stephens’ “Five Models in Ruins, 1981”

Five Models in Ruins, 1981

Written by Caitlin Saylor Stephens

Directed by Morgan Green

Performances through June 1, 2025

Claire Tow Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

The cast of Five Models in Ruins, 1981 (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

The title of Caitlin Sayor Stephens’ Five Models in Ruins, 1981 overexplains the obvious that these models are in ruins both literally (at a rundown mansion in the English countryside, where they will wear the just-married Princess Diana’s discarded wedding gowns for a shoot with a famous American photographer) and figuratively (all five—and the photographer, Roberta—are in various states of emotional distress).

There’s arrogant supermodel Chrissy; cynical Tatiana; nervous newbie Grace; sardonic former superstar Alex; and Sandy, an English makeup artist and former model whom Roberta talks into joining the shoot after the fifth model doesn’t show since they’ve worked together before. As everyone prepares for the shoot, dealing with no phone or food (the former maybe, the latter unlikely), they argue, commiserate, battle, bond. The dialogue is lively but superficial, as each woman gets the chance to kvetch about sexually menacing men in the industry or the worst photo shoot of her career.  But none of this makes any of the models truly thought-out and differentiated individuals.

Roberta, a driven if cynical industry vet (apparently based on American photographer Deborah Turbeville), comes closest to being fully rounded, and she’s played by Elizabeth Marvel with her usual intensity. As the models, Stella Everett (Chrissy), Maia Novi (Tatiana), Britne Oldford (Alex), Sarah Marie Rodriguez (Grace) and Madeline Wise (Sandy) do what they can with their underwritten characters, but only Everett overcomes Stephens’ script with a performance of imposing physicality and biting humor.

Needless to say, Five Models doesn’t build to any kind of apotheosis. Instead it climaxes after Roberta hears from her editor at Vogue that he’s pulling the plug on the shoot and she loses it, letting out a primal scream that the others join until it builds to a clamorous crescendo that’s technically impressive but dramatically ineffectual. Morgan Green adroitly directs on Afsoon Pajoufar’s detailed, cluttered mansion set that, along with Cha See’s ingenious lighting, is a delicious visual asset for an undernourished play. 

Off-Broadway Play Review—Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” with Billy Crudup

Ghosts

Written by Henrik Ibsen, a new version by Mark O’Rowe

Directed by Jack O’Brien

Performances through April 26, 2025

Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

Lily Rabe and Billy Crudup in Ghosts (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts might have scandalized audiences after its 1882 premiere—tackling as it did sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimate children, euthanasia, incest and religious hypocrisy—but it’s far milder stuff for today’s audiences, so directors and adapters must work harder to make it relevant. 

Nearly 20 years ago, Ingmar Bergman brought his celebrated Swedish troupe to BAM in Brooklyn for an incendiary staging that included bits of Strindberg and even Bergman’s own material to shore up Ibsen’s script, along with a memorable turn by the great Pernilla August as the widow Helena Alving. About a decade ago, Richard Eyre's compelling adaptation that was a hit in London also took BAM by storm with Lesley Manville as an indelible Helena. 

Unfortunately, in his mostly adroit staging at Lincoln Center Theater, director Jack O’Brien has saddled himself with a subpar Helena: Lily Rabe gives her usual mannered, ineffectual performance, barking out the lines wrongheadedly and coming across more Helena’s beloved son Oswald’s older sister than his overprotective mother who’s hiding a horrible family secret that will eventually come out. 

O’Brien does better with the rest of his cast, even though Ella Beatty is a bit stiff as Helene’s housemaid Regina, in love with Oswald—who wants to marry her and take her back to Paris, where he lives as a tortured artist. Although Oswald is played by Levon Hawke, making his New York stage debut, the actor’s lack of polish works well for Helena’s sickly son, wracked by the syphilis he inherited from his dead father; Hawke is especially convincing in the play’s shattering final moments, when he—now blinded by the disease—begs his mother to put him out of his misery.

Regina’s estranged father Engstrand—helping to build the orphanage Helen has planned in her husband’s memory—is played with his customary intensity by Hamish Linklater, while Pastor Manders—Helena’s long-ago paramour who embodies the hypocrisy of the church—is a role tailor-made for Billy Crudup, who’s expert at playing complicated characters who alternate being cheered for and sneered at.

Mark O’Rowe provides a lucid adaptation of Ibsen’s masterpiece; if he and O’Brien falter in a needless framing device of the performers walking onstage and picking up scripts that—after Beatty and Linklater act out the play’s opening lines in differing ways as if they’re rehearsing—they don’t look at and which are immediately jettisoned, Ibsen’s morality tale moves swiftly until it arrives at its inevitably tragic conclusion.

John Lee Beatty’s aptly minimalist set, Japhy Weideman’s incisive lighting, Jess Goldstein’s spot-on costumes and Scott Lehrer and Mark Bennett’s evocative sound contribute handsomely to this story of a family haunted by unseen but always present specters, culminating with a metaphorical but very real destructive conflagration that might be a sign from the almighty about the family’s immorality, something Manders—who convinced Helena to forego insurance for the orphanage because God would take care of things—ruefully opines. It may be singleminded, but Ghosts remains potent theater.

NYC Theater Review—“A Streetcar Named Desire” with Paul Mescal at BAM

A Streetcar Named Desire 

Written by Tennessee Williams

Directed by Rebecca Frecknall

Performances through April 6,2025

BAM Strong Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY

bam.org

Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire (photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Although A Streetcar Named Desire hasn’t fared well on Broadway—if anyone even remembers botched revivals like the 2005 disaster with Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly and stillborn 1992 production with Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin—things have been different in Brooklyn, where in 2009 a fresh take on Tennessee Williams’ classic drama at BAM gave it back its poetry and poignancy: anchored by a surprisingly unmannered Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois and directed with unadorned realism by Liv Ullmann, the Sydney Theatre Company production was as good a Streetcar as could be wished for.

Now, London’s Almeida Theatre stops at BAM with its Streetcar, directed with arrogant assurance by Rebecca Frecknall, whose deconstruction of Williams’ familiar drama has some interesting detours but is burdened by too much distracting, unnecessary gimmickry. Heading her mostly capable cast and making his American theater debut, current heartthrob Paul Mescal plays Stanley Kowalski intelligently, letting us see the humor as well as the rage of this self-styled “Pole” (not “Polack,” as he corrects Blanche) who loves his wife Stella fiercely—so much so that he at times lets his passions spill over into brutishness and violence. 

As Stella, Blanche’s younger sister, Anjana Vasan is a sympathetic presence. And at the performance I attended, a solid Eduardo Ackerman subbed for Dwane Walcott as Stanley’s poker-playing buddy Mitch, who is sweet on Blanche until things go sour. But things get problematic with Patsy Ferran’s Blanche, a strangely off-putting performance that has little of Williams’ poetry and a surfeit of nervous energy. Most damaging, however, is that Ferran and Mescal have little chemistry together; at one point, Mescal gets on all fours and prowls around like a literal beast to try and underline the feral attraction between these memorably mismatched characters. It doesn’t really work.

Frecknall seems to sense this; she all but eclipses Stanley and Blanche’s relationship with busy stage business. Madeleine Girling’s set, a square wooden platform with a walkway surrounding it, resembles a boxing ring sans ropes. When actors are not in a scene, they mill around and hand props to those performing, like trainers giving the boxers a towel or a bottle of water during a match. Lee Curran’s lighting and Peter Rice’s sound design strongly contribute to the claustrophobic atmosphere.

Occasionally, the cast breaks into stylized dance moves that aren’t integrated enough to be effective—only the movements of the cast’s male actors closely surrounding Blanche when Stanley rapes her is memorable. And although Williams asks for a “blue piano” in his stage directions, Frecknall provides music that almost entirely comprises a drummer on a second tier above the stage (the talented Tom Penn, who also plays the doctor in the final scene) pounding away throughout, needlessly underscoring the dramatic beats, so to speak. And a repeated ghostly image of Blanche’s dead first husband needlessly clutters her monologues without any additional illumination.

One thing this Streetcar shares with the superior Blanchett/Ullmann production is a misconceived ending. In the 2009 Sydney Theatre staging’s biggest misstep, Blanchett rode Williams’ poetry too hard and director Ullmann allowed Blanche the indignity of being led away while not properly dressed. Here, Frecknall turns what should be a shattering ending into mush, the mass of performers onstage obscuring Blanche’s final tragedy—it misses the theatrical magic that Williams’ most indelible creation always yearned for. 

Off-Broadway Play Review—Chisa Hutchinson’s “Amerikin” at Primary Stages

Amerikin

Written by Chisa Hutchinson

Directed by Jade King Carroll

Performances through April 13, 2025

Primary Stages @ 59 E 59Theatres, 59 East 59th Street, NYC

primaryStages.org

Molly Carden and Daniel Abeles in Amerikin (photo: James Leynse)

Chisa Hutchinson’s Amerikin, an examination of how the country’s racial attitudes haven’t changed much, was written in 2018—during the first Trump administration, which seems like the good old days—and could serve as a cautionary tale of what’s happening now, on an even more devastating scale.

It’s too bad, then, that Amerikin seems a blueprint for a more insightful comic drama, heavyhandedly welding two plays together to form an intriguing but unsatisfying one. (The first act is “Inside Out,” and the second is “Outside In,” which explains it all.) We first meet Jeff Browning (his last name a bad pun) of Sharpsburg, Maryland—near where the Civil War’s bloodiest battle, Antietam, was fought; he’s a blue-collar stiff who wants to give his newborn son a head start in life by taking a genetic test to show his purity so he can join a local white-supremist organization, the Knights. Complicating things are Jeff’s wife Michelle, who suffers from extreme post-partum depression, and next-door neighbor Alma, Jeff’s girlfriend before he married Michelle. 

Jeff discovers his DNA isn’t as pure as he thought, and the play’s first act ends with a cross burning on the front lawn just as the family is leaving to celebrate Jeff joining the Knights. Jeff’s friend, computer whiz Poot, successfully fudged the results but Poot’s latest girlfriend, daughter of one of the group’s leaders, saw the original report and relayed the truth about Jeff’s ancestry: 14 percent sub-Saharan African. 

The second act introduces veteran Washington Post columnist Gerald and his daughter, aspiring journalist Chris. Gerald saw a Facebook post from Alma about how Jeff’s life has been ruined by these events and decides it’s a perfect subject for his column: a white racist isn’t white enough to join a racist organization. So Gerald reluctantly brings Chris along for the drive to rural Maryland (Chris says to her father, “You think I’m letting you go into Confederate territory by yourself, black man?”) to meet Jeff and hear his side of the story—about which he isn’t entirely truthful.

Amerikin traffics in narrative contrivances and cardboard characters. There are shrewd observations and sympathy for everyone in the play, however loathsome they may be personally, but even though there’s much to be said for creating dialogue and bridging differences, there are too many stereotypes, easy jokes and “shocking” moments like Jeff naming his black dog the N word, of all things, or Michelle singing a lullaby to her newborn that goes, “Lullaby and goodnight/Shoulda had you aborted.” Then there’s a suicide that happened a week earlier, which could never be covered up in such a tiny living space. 

Director Jade King Carroll has trouble making it all cohere, but Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s lively set of Jeff and Michelle’s home—replete with Trump-Pence stickers on a refrigerator filled with Miller beer—and Jen Caprio’s spot-on costumes ground the caricature in an identifiable, and sadly real, America. And though the actors are constricted by the script, Daniel Abeles makes Jeff a likable dope and Molly Carden takes the impossible role of Michelle—who isn’t given much to do except cry and rage, while her ultimate fate occurs offstage—and winds her so tightly and tautly that she deserves a more thoughtful play to bring out her character’s fascinating contradictions.

Off-Broadway Review—Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” with Calista Flockhart and Christian Slater

Curse of the Starving Class

Written by Sam Shepard; directed by Scott Elliott

Performances through April 6, 2025

The New Group @ Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

thenewgroup.org

Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart with Lois in Curse of the Starving Class (photo: Monique Carboni)

Sam Shepard was at the height of his powers when he wrote Curse of the Starving Class, in 1977; it’s the first of his dysfunctional family plays of that era: Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and his masterpiece A Lie of the Mind. However—at least in Scott Elliott’s new staging—Curse is cursed by diminishing dramatic returns and fraught symbolism that turns crushingly literal.

The play revolves around the Tate family living on a desolate farm in rural California—father Weston, a drunkard, is barely home, while his wife Ella is busy planning a new life by befriending a shady real estate agent-banker Taylor with the hopes he will buy the property. Their children are Wesley, their 20ish son who fluctuates between anger and sympathy toward his erstwhile parents, and teenage Emma, who has designs on leaving for good.

For nearly three hours, these people battle one another psychologically and physically as their relationships ebb and flow. Weston—who scared Ella so much the night before the play begins that she called the cops on him after one of his drunken rages ended with him destroying the kitchen door and window—threatens both Ella and Taylor, whom he takes to be her paramour, and who probably suckered him into buying worthless desert property. Meanwhile, the owner of the local bar Weston frequents shows up one day with a lawful deed for the family farm that Weston agreed to sell to while on a bender.

Shepard is a master of poetic dialogue that reveals his damaged characters’ buried secrets, and some of that survives in Curse, but the pregnant monologues by each family member have been staged by Elliott as Shakespearean soliloquies aimed at the audience, blunting their casual immediacy. Elliott also has encouraged the actors to remain in one gear throughout, which Christian Slater (Weston) and Calista Flockhart (Ella) mostly cling to, while Cooper Hoffman (Wesley) and Stella Marcus (Emma) break free occasionally, to their—and the play’s—benefit.

Even the handling of the family sheep, one of Shepard’s most potent metaphors, is inadequate. In the script, the sheep is sick with maggots, and Wesley brings it inside to nurse it, much to his mother’s chagrin.  But in this production, the sheep, played by Lois (sometimes Gladys), looks quite healthy—so much that the animal steals the scene when Weston is telling an anecdote. When the audience giggles over the sheep’s natural reaction to Slater speaking to it, it throws everyone out of the drama. Which might be a good thing, for—despite Jeff Croiter’s canny lighting and Leah Gelpe’s sharp sound design (too bad Arnulfo Maldonado’s kitchen set is less run down than it should be)—Elliott’s staging is too unbalanced to forcefully embody Shepard’s fractured family.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” in Brooklyn

Henry IV

Written by William Shakespeare; adapted by Dakin Matthews

Directed by Eric Tucker

Performances through March 2, 2025

Theatre for a New Audience, 262 Ashland Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

tfana.org

       James Udom, Cara Ricketts, Jay O. Sanders, Slate Holmgren and Elan Zafir in Henry IV (photo: Gerry Goodstein)

When I saw Dakin Matthews’ canny distillation of the two parts of Henry IV at Lincoln Center Theater in 2003, I found it the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen in New York (and still do)—Jack O’Brien adroitly directed a star-studded cast headed by Kevin Kline as Falstaff, and Matthews’ adaptation subtly distilled the essence of both works into one absorbing four-hour play.

Matthews’ Henry IV returns in a far different staging at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Unlike O’Brien’s lush, almost cinematic production, Eric Tucker directs a smaller-scaled version in the round. There are drawbacks to this approach, since the action takes place among dozens of characters in several far-flung locales, including the king’s court, London taverns and a battlefield. The cramped stage area is acknowledged by actors sitting in seats among the audience when not performing, which fosters more intimacy among spectators and performers. And performing in the round by definition has actors facing away from a part of the audience at all times, which has a tendency to swallow important dialogue.

Nicole E. Lang’s lighting illuminates the proceedings on Jimmy Stubbs’ minimalist set both dramatically and psychologically, while Catherine Zuber and AC Gottlieb’s costumes pleasingly mix period and modern. Tucker nicely paces the drama among the king’s council discussions, the rebels’ machinations and the lively tavern interludes among London’s lowlifes. He has also double-cast several roles, so some performers change costumes and become other characters right onstage. It’s a diverting effect, but it also points up the difficulty of doing the Bard on a budget, since such busyness at times detracts from the play itself.

Of those taking on multiple roles, best are the charismatic Jordan Bellow, who adroitly shuttles between Prince Hal’s brother John and Hal’s partner in frivolity Ned Poins; and the winning Cara Ricketts, who makes both a touching Lady Percy and a rollicking Doll Tearsheet. Matthews himself—who played a supporting role in the 2003 Lincoln Center production—gives the title monarch a sturdy royal presence. 

Shakespeare is most interested in the relationship between Hal and his friend, the braggart, womanizer, and self-styled wit named Sir John Falstaff. When Hal prods Falstaff to even greater heights of self-delusion, it makes Falstaff simultaneously funnier and more sorrowful. Elijah Jones finds a nice balance between Hal’s foolishness and budding maturity, and Jay O. Sanders follows in Kevin Kline’s large footsteps to create a Falstaff who is both outsized and normal, buffoonish yet always sympathetic. 

Near the end, Hal—now Henry V after his father’s death—coldly banishes his erstwhile friend and sparring partner from the kingdom; Sanders plays this moment with shock and resignation but also a sliver of pride that the young man Falstaff believes he himself has led to this moment has, indeed, met the moment. This is not an essential Shakespeare staging but it is entertaining, which nowadays is nothing to sneeze at.

Off-Broadway Play Review—“The Blood Quilt” by Katori Hall

The Blood Quilt

Written by Katori Hall

Directed by Lileana Blaine-Cruz

Performances through December 29, 2024

Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, 150 West 65th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

The cast of The Blood Quilt (photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Family get-togethers have a way of reopening old wounds and spurring surprising revelations in plays like Long Day’s Journey Into Night and August: Osage County. Although it has a few loose stitches, Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt is a welcome addition to this storied canon.

On Kwemera Island, off the coast of Georgia, the four Jernigan half-sisters—each has a different father—with their physical and emotional baggage in tow get together in the house where they all lived on the anniversary of the death of Mama, the matriarch, to create the latest of the family’s memory quilts. Clementine, the oldest sister, still lives there, having taken care of Mama until her final breath. Second oldest is Gio, a police officer, who’s in the middle of a nasty divorce. The third daughter, Cassan, an army nurse, brings along her teenage daughter Zambia, who’s an advertisement for TMI. The youngest—and Mama’s favorite, the others sneeringly intone—is Amber, attorney to Hollywood stars, who arrives from Southern California. 

Over a long weekend, the Jernigan women face down their own demons, confronting each other’s jaundiced memories and knocking the chips off the others’ shoulders. If their revelations sometimes have a contrived quality—Amber admitting that she has HIV at the close of the first act puts the play’s title in a very different light—Hall admirably never shies away from showing the resulting emotional fallout. 

The quilts are central to Hall’s play both as metaphor and as a living part of this family’s history. On Adam Rigg’s astonishing two-tiered set of the family home on the water, gorgeous multicolored quilts hang from every conceivable surface, visualizing the very complex fabric of the sisters’ relationships. The quilts also trigger the most dramatic subplot: after Mama’s will is read, Cassan and especially Gio are upset that Amber—the least deserving sister, in their eyes—has inherited the priceless set of these painstakingly handwoven quilts. 

But Clementine—who stayed next to their dying Mama while the others stayed away—has had enough, and she cuts to the chase about what being present or absent in others’ lives means; it’s Hall’s best monologue in a play filled with pregnant dialogue among this distaff quintet: 

Amber didn’t need to see mama like that. Nobody needed to see mama like that. I didn’t need to see mama like that. So don’t sit up there on that bull riding high and mighty thanking that just cause yo ass showed up at the funeral and cried and did yo little performance that you was a good daughter. No, unh, unh, nosiree. When folks living that’s when you need to see ‘em. Not when they DEAD. Not when they beginning to turn and whither in they graves. Y’all all left mama to die alone in this house.

If Hall provides one too many endings as more secrets are revealed (including a disturbing but essential scene describing statutory rape), through the mixture of tears and laughs, the real warmth of her generous portrait becomes clear. Director Lileana Blaine-Cruz, who understands the many textures of Hall’s poignant canvas, guides her marvelous cast to get to the nakedly honest emotional truth. Crystal Dickinson (Clementine), Adrienne C. Moore (Gio), Susan Kelechi Watson (Cassan), Lauren E. Banks (Amber) and Mirirai (Zambia) do extraordinarily affecting work separately and together—the most important stitches in this intricately woven Blood Quilt.

Off-Broadway Review—Jessica Goldberg’s “Babe” with Marisa Tomei

Babe

Written by Jessica Goldberg; directed by Scott Elliott

Performances through December 22, 2024

The New Group @ Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

thenewgroup.org

Marisa Tomei in Babe (photo: Monique Carboni)

Jessica Goldberg’s Babe records the interaction among a trio of characters in an independent record label’s office. Gus is the infamously abrasive founder who pines for the good old days and shrugs off being #MeToo’ed; Abigail is his loyal right hand for decades who might be the power behind the throne; and Katharine is a young new hire who immediately becomes a thorn in their sides.

Goldberg touches on pertinent—and, sadly, prevalent—themes that still dog the music business, notably the good old boys’ network that someone like Abigail has had to delicately navigate. But, although Goldberg gives her a familiar backstory—Abigail signed and had an intimate relationship with a singer named Kat Wonder, who became a huge star in the ‘90s before succumbing to her demons and dying far too young—it remains on the surface, even with a few flashbacks shoehorned in that bring Kat back. 

That’s Babe’s biggest problem—all its characters are merely sketched in, underdeveloped. Their interactions and verbal showdowns are entertaining (Goldberg has an ear for clever dialogue) but dramatically insufficient; there’s never a feeling that something weighty is at stake. Katharine is simply a catalyst for Abigail to grapple with her professional relationship with Gus after he’s finally canned for blatant and unapologetic sexism. Abigail takes over but now must deal with the fallout, or even take the blame, for years of such policies. Yet even this potentially interesting twist is given short shrift. 

Scott Elliott’s adroit direction, on Derek McLane’s nicely appointed set, smooths out some of the rough edges yet can’t erase the sense that Babe is merely an 85-minute demo for a more in-depth, dare I say longer, study. As Gus, Arliss Howard is properly grotesque and frequently hilarious, while Gracie McGraw plays Katharine bluntly and without much distinction, which also describes her few scenes as Kat Wonder.

As for Marisa Tomei, this resourceful actress does much right, like subtly showing the effects of being Gus’ second in command for so long. Abigail also has cancer (of course she does!), and the short scenes of her post-chemo are the play’s most effective, thanks to Tomei’s ability to look genuinely sick and vulnerable. But only at the end, when Abigail exhilaratingly lets loose as another of Kat’s tunes (by the guitar-driven trio BETTY) plays, do character and performer finally transcend the material.

Off-Broadway Review—Amy Berryman’s “Walden” with Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters

Walden

Written by Amy Berryman; directed by Wendy White

Performances through November 24, 2024

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Rossum and Winters in Walden (photo: Joan Marcus)

Written and first staged during the pandemic, Amy Berryman’s Walden has the scent of lockdowns and quarantines in its dystopian story—set in an isolated cabin in an unidentified but identifiable near-future—of twin sisters, who are poles apart but also alike, whose rocky reunion occurs as human civilization seems to be in its final throes on earth.

Former NASA designer Stella (Emmy Rossum) lives with her fiancée, Bryan (Motell Foster, likably natural), in a remote cabin where they grow their own food, Stella makes her own wine and Bryan traps rabbits and shoots deer. Bryan is an E.A., or earth advocate, part of a burgeoning group militantly opposed to wasting billions on making the moon or Mars habitable instead of using that cash to help save our planet. (We hear ominous reports of tsunamis and climate refugees on Stella’s radio.) 

Then Stella’s twin sister Cassie (Zoë Winters) arrives, having just returned from spending a year working and living at the moon habitat. Since she was able to miraculously grow food from scratch on the moon, she has become a global hero. Cassie and Stella, both brilliant, have lived in the long shadow of their famous astronaut father (their mother died while giving birth), and when Cassie confesses why she’s come to visit, the sisters must wrestle with decisions that may well decide the future of the human race. 

A play that’s titled Walden—which is also explained heavyhandedly in the dialogue—might be short on subtlety, but what Berryman has written is actually a touching examination of complicated family dynamics set off by an ongoing global cataclysm. Although she approaches contrivance by setting up a messy love triangle—one too many times does Stella allow Cassie and Bryan to be conveniently alone—it’s a tiny lapse that’s not followed through, thankfully. 

It also helps that Rossum and Winters are superb as the twins, providing more humanity, complexity and even humor to the sisters’ relationship than I’d think even Berryman might have expected. In their final conversation, which takes place after some time has passed, they discuss their current paths: Cassie is in training for the mission that will take her to Mars for the rest of her life and Stella announces that she is pregnant with Bryan’s child. It’s the perfect distillation of how the play dovetails the expansive with the intimate, beautifully written and acted. 

Directed for maximum emotional effect by Whitney White, Walden is also propped up by Matt Saunders’ set, Adam Honoré’s lighting and Lee Kinney’s sound design, which all contribute to the alternately ominous and reassuring atmosphere.

Off-Broadway Play Review—“Cellino v. Barnes”

Cellino v. Barnes

Written by Mike B. Breen and David Rafailedes

Directed by Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse

Performances through October 13, 2024

Asylum NYC, 123 East 24th Street, New York, NY

cellino-v-barnes.com

Eric William Morris and Noah Weisberg in Cellino v. Barnes (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

A couple of Buffalo legends, personal-injury attorneys Ross Cellino and Steve Barnes became famous—then infamous—for their billboards and earworm jingle that was heard on radio and TV ads throughout Western New York (and which seemed to follow me as they opened offices in New York City and Long Island). The melody for “888-8888” will unfortunately remain embedded in anyone’s head who’s ever heard it, including those audiences who see Cellino v. Barnes, a purposefully silly, occasionally funny parody of how the men began, then ended, their law norm-shattering partnership in Buffalo. 

Anyone wanting real insights into the ethics and gamesmanship of all ambulance chasing attorneys—Cellino and Barnes were preceded by the legendary William Mattar, whose last name had the good fortune to rhyme with “hurt in a car,” as Cellino jealously points out—will need to look elsewhere, for Cellino v. Barnes is content to throw anything and everything at the wall and see what sticks. It has the feel of an SNL skit gone rogue: Starting with the notion that Barnes was an insufferable egghead and Cellino was a complete idiot, the play, cleverly staged by Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse, ricochets from one extreme to another, shooting off in all directions simultaneously with variable comic results.

Writers Mike B. Breen (who’s from Buffalo) and David Rafailedes originally wrote Cellino v. Barnes in 2018 as a vehicle for themselves to perform, so it’s not surprising that the play contains a lot of rat-a-tat dialogue and a surfeit of knockabout physical comedy. The actors in this staging—Eric William Morris (Cellino) and Noah Weisberg (Barnes)—certainly deserve praise for their breathless performances, although Weisberg’s Barnes bald cap is quite distracting…which may be the point. 

For 80 minutes, Morris and Weisberg race around the cramped stage reenacting the men’s quick rise to becoming a multi-million-dollar firm, first in Western New York then downstate. It begins as a bromance and ends with the pair squaring off in a prize fight; before the finale, they joke that the bitter, acrimonious battle leading to their split and forming separate firms—the Barnes Firm and Cellino Law—was simply a PR stunt. 

Of course, Barnes’ 2020 death with his niece in a small plane crash is not mentioned at all, since it’s a sad and bizarre epilogue to a compellingly strange story. It also underlines how reality usually writes a much more complicated ending than two playwrights can, however amusing they make their quick run-through.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Alexis Scheer’s “Breaking the Story” with Maggie Siff

Breaking the Story

Written by Alexis Scheer; directed by Jo Bonney

Performances through June 23, 2024

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Louis Ozawa and Maggie Siff in Breaking the Story (photo: Joan Marcus)

Alexis Scheer’s Breaking the Story opens with a literal bang, jolting not only the audience but also Marina, a seasoned foreign correspondent who’s been covering troubled regions for decades. Marina and Bear, her colleague, photographer and fiancé, are presumed dead after the explosion; when the dust settles, she and Bear are in a quiet place in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Marina grew up and where she has bought a large house with a lot of property. She muses aloud whether to retire after this weekend, when she’s getting a lifetime achievement award for her work.

Also present are Marina’s daughter Cruz, an aspiring singer thinking of forgoing college to Marina’s consternation (Cruz’s songs, cowritten by Scheer, punctuate the action); Gummy, Marina’s sardonic mother; Sonia, Cruz’s godmother; Fed, TV news anchor, Marina’s ex and Cruz’s dad; and Nikki, a young, ambitious war journalist who’s in town to give Marina her award. Marina and Bear plan to get married in these bucolic surroundings, but Marina’s PTSD intrudes, fragments of her war exploits haunting her—as she wonders whether she was a good enough mother to Cruz while dodging bullets in faraway lands. Marina’s also worried that a long-held secret might damage her reputation: She wasn’t fully truthful in her reporting at her first war-zone catastrophe years earlier. 

Although 80 minutes are not enough to create a properly complex portrait, Scheer and always resourceful director Jo Bonney intrepidly probe Marina’s scarred and battered psyche with a series of quick snapshots that alternate black humor with seriousness, even if the more surreal moments (like a funny but odd cake tasting sequence) are too fleeting to truly hit the mark. Still, it leads to a well-executed Twilight Zone-esque twist ending, as the final moments return to the very beginning. There are bits in the dialogue that hint at where Scheer is going with her story, and it effectively visualizes the gulf between Marina’s exciting foreign exploits and her relatively dull civilian existence.

Julie Halston is her usual boisterous self as Gummy, while Geneva Carr is an effulgent Sonia, Gabrielle Policano a winning Cruz, Tala Ashe a lively Nikki, Louis Ozawa an endearing Bear and Matthew Salvidar an efficient Fed. At the center stands Maggie Siff, whose Marina is marvelously shaded; as usual, Siff elevates Scheer’s writing with her compelling presence. Now that Billions is over, maybe we’ll get more of Siff onstage.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Abe Koogler’s “Staff Meal”

Staff Meal

Written by Abe Koogler

Directed by Morgan Green

Through May 24, 2024

Playwrights Horizons

416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

playwrightshorizons.org

Susannah Flood and Greg Keller in Staff Meal (photo: Chelcie Parry)

Abe Koogler’s play Staff Meal teases at being many things—surreal adventure, nightmarish parody, quirky rom-com—but ends up being not much of anything, a tasting menu with too many options and not enough flavor. The flimsy, one-act conceit begins with several blackout scenes of a couple, Ben and Mina, meeting cute in a coffee shop while working on their laptops. After some amusing introductory dialogue, Ben finally asks Mina out to dinner; as they walk the streets, they make small talk about where they’re from and discover a posh restaurant that is inexplicably empty. 

After they’re seated, the couple is never served dinner—shades of Luis Bunuel’s own surreal satire, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—because the wine they order is in a cellar deep underground. While waiting, Ben discusses his idiosyncratic take on the film Titanic while Mina describes her bizarre belief that she is inextricably linked to fictional characters like the rat in Ratatouille or the whale in Moby-Dick.  

Meanwhile, the waiter who traveled great lengths to fetch their bottle explains in a long speech why the wine cellar is so far away, who the restaurant owner is and why it was difficult to find the exact wine they ordered. Two other servers appear, as does the executive chef: they have their own tales to tell, as does a vagrant who sneaks onstage from the wings a couple times and who turns out to be the restaurant’s owner. (That the vagrant, owner and chef are played by the same actor is another of Koogler’s fuzzy conceits.)

After the play meanders on for awhile, an older woman stands up in the audience and complains about how silly, trite and cliched it has been so far—that she’s not wrong is part of Koogler’s self-puncturing joke, but he also lets her go on too long telling her own story that’s silly, trite and cliched, undercutting his initially amusing and salient point. 

And so it goes for 90 minutes. Ben, Mina and the other characters (include a second vagrant, if you please) are always frustrated in their attempts to make some sort of connection—even more shades of Bunuel’s film—but Koogler’s undercooked play has the feel of an elaborately planned gourmet meal where the diners are instead served microwaved fast-food leftovers. 

What’s supposed to be absurdist is merely absurd; a conversation between Ben and Mina about a beloved pet he had as a kid growing up in Spain is literally a shaggy-dog story. Director Morgan Green does a credible job of maneuvering through the weeds to find some kind of pathway: Masha Tsimring’s expressive lighting, Jian Jung’s subtly witty sets, Kaye Voyce’s clever costumes and Tei Blow’s foreboding sound design create the essence of an unnerving journey that the play doesn’t supply. 

In a game cast, Susannah Flood (Mina) and Greg Keller (Ben) are able to best transcend the script to create a real spark of interest. They are so engaging together that it would be nice to see the pair in a real rom-com—as long as they don’t stop in a place like this for a bite.

Off-Broadway Play Review—World Premiere of “Jordans”

Jordans

Written by Ife Olujobi; directed by Whitney White

Performances through May 12, 2024

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NYC

publictheater.org

Kate Walsh, Naomi Lorrain and Toby Onwumere in Jordans (photo: Joan Marcus)

Before it goes completely bonkers in the second act, Ife Olujobi’s Jordans is a bluntly effectively satire about how ingrained American racism affects Blacks, specifically receptionist Jordan, the lone Black employee at Atlas Studios, a Brooklyn event space that’s populated by interchangeable white employees and led by a stereotypically fiery middle-aged white woman named Hailey.

Jordan hopes to move up in the company but is treated like a mere servant (or worse) by the others, for whom she makes coffee or cleans up after when there’s vomit or backed-up sewage. When the company hires a second Black employee, a man also named Jordan (the playwright cheekily names him 1. Jordan, and his last name is, yes, Savage) who’s in a position of supposed power as the new director of culture, our exasperated heroine at first is on her guard, then drops her guard, then…well, that’s all in the second act.

The first half of Jordans moves swimmingly and has some pointed laughs, although there are easy jokes as well, since the targets (clueless whites, office politics) are obvious. Then act two begins, and Olujobi’s play awkwardly moves toward more abstract, surreal lunacy that includes a surprising pregnancy (the two Jordans increasingly become interchangeable, to themselves and the others) and a literally bloody denouement.

Jordans climaxes with its heroine staring hauntedly at the audience, but in this context, the ending makes little sense, either as reality—it’s not as if Jordan is brandishing a gun and can’t be subdued—or as a stark metaphor for unleashing her cumulative anger over her subjugation. 

Whitney White’s brisk production plays out on Matt Saunders’ antiseptically white set, dominated by a large, curved wall that acts as a mocking hulk against Jordan’s aspirations, all cleverly underscored by Cha See’s lighting. The script has Jordan moving around chairs, tables and props between scenes as a way of showing both her subordination and indispensability to all, but since it’s the third straight off-Broadway show where I saw performers move props, it was less than effective. 

The supporting cast provides amusing caricatures, while Toby Onwumere, as 1. Jordan, and Kate Walsh, as Hailey, are better, making Olujobi’s lines far more biting than they are on the page. Best of all is Naomi Lorrain, who as Jordan carries the weight of this serious but stretched-out joke on her shoulders, giving a colossal performance that is funny, sympathetic and even touching.