Red Velvet
Raven Theater

The conventions of the biographical play have remained largely unchanged since their inception: a single individual with an exceptional idea stands by his/her convictions against adversity, authority and assorted naysayers. In the movies, our hero typically emerges triumphant, but in plays, not always so.

The hero of Lolita Chakrabarti's meticulously researched biodrama, Red Velvet, is Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor whose career, from 1825 to 1867, spanned all of Europe in a repertoire dominated—but not restricted to—Shakespearean classics.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Underneath
Odyssey Theater

The Irish writer/performer Pat Kinevane has become a master-monologist, beginning with Forgotten and Silent in 2006 and 2011, respectively. Now he has come to L.A. with his latest solo piece, Underneath, which he has been developing since 2013 with his usual collaborator, Jim Culleton, head of Fishamble, Dublin’s new-play theatre company.

In Underneath, Kinevane, tricked out in fithy black rags and black face–he must be the first performer to black up in L.A.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Nat Turner in Jerusalem
New York Theater Workshop

Nathan Alan Davis's new play, Nat Turner in Jerusalem, at the New York Theatre Workshop, presents Turner, shackled in a holding room, contemplating the sunset. It is the evening before his execution after his recent conviction of leading the infamous and bloody August 1831 slave rebellion.

"The sun will set over the hill. Then it will be the moon’s turn to keep watch over Jerusalem. And tomorrow, all of Virginia will come to the gallows to watch me die."

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Barbecue
The Geffen Playhouse

No animals were harmed during the course of Barbecue, but an awful lot of fun was poked at two low-life families, one white, the other black, who have gathered in a park to pull off an intervention.

In Robert O’Hara’s outrageous, fiendishly clever comedy, one family suddenly replaces the other after a blackout, with identical names and behavior.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Assassins
FreeFall Theater

Assassins not only begins with the song “Everybody’s Got the Right,” but freeFall’s production characterizes with its title how everything about murderers and attempted murderers’ motives make sense in a clear context. Their story takes place in a carnival whose theme is a meeting to help each other get off what’s on their minds. To mainly balladic music, the protagonists aim (and that’s the operative word) to pull off the stunt of making fame via killings in a festive marketplace.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Made in Texas
Music Box Theater

It was a night to showcase the singers & songwriters of the Lone Star State, and the stars of Houston’s Music Box Theater were certainly up to the challenge with their latest production, Made in Texas. Rebekah Dahl, the company’s co-founder (along with husband and fellow Masquerade Theater veteran, Brad Scarborough), gave a Texas-sized welcome to the crowd, and then it was on to a sample of Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River” that offered just a brief strident moment of excess volume concern until the talented cast members gave an eye-roll to the sound board operator

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Siamese Sex Show
Lounge Theater

Siamese Sex Show is a rap musical set in a dystopian USA ruled by Monocorp, a conglomerate headed by a power-hungry CEO (Keith E. Wright) who has started a campaign to make intimacy illegal. In its place, people will be obliged to take emotional comfort from “the love light,” a pseudo-sex product manufactured by the conglomerate.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Visiting Edna
Steppenwolf Theater

The first characters we meet introduce themselves to us as, respectively, Television, played by a bubbly Sally Murphy, and Cancer—the disease, not the astrological sign—portrayed by a suave Tim Hopper (not to be confused with the Angel of Death, who appears later in the play as the most ludicrous personification of the Grim Reaper since Edward Albee's beach boy in The American Dream).

When the conversation of the remaining onstage personnel in Visiting Edna revolves around such icky geriatric-linked bodily functions/apparatus as heart failure, diabetes, arth

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Man in the Ring
Court Theater

Boxing fans recognized the real-life events fictionalized in Oliver Mayer's Blade to the Heat right away when it premiered in 1994, but changing social attitudes since then currently permit Michael Cristofer to safely recount the facts in the scandal that forever altered public perceptions of a once-popular pastime.

The career of Emile Griffith, between 1958 and 1963, was the quintessential all-American success story. Under the management of factory owner Howie Albert, the milliner from the Caribbean island of St.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Encounter, The
John Golden

And now, for something completely different…The Encounter must be heard to be believed. As soon as the audience is seated, a very casually dressed British fellow (Simon McBurney) begins talking. So, not a stagehand at all. He asks “Has the show begun?” Indeed, it has. He informs us that he’s taking a photo of us to show to his daughter, a charming little voice who keeps interrupting his story when she should be in bed asleep. We never see her, or any of the other characters who are mentioned.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Cirque du Soleil - Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities
Randalls Island

Kurios is the best Cirque du Soleil production New York has seen. It’s by far the most cheerful, and the most family friendly. Of course, there are the usual zany moments, beginning with a conglom of crazy scientists dressed in white lab coats. A huge clock on the back wall reads 11:10. There’s smoke coming from the ceiling, and the optical illusion of conjoined twins. Cast members carry a huge train overhead. There’s an obviously well-padded enormously fat man, an elegant lady in a straw hat, a fellow with a slinky on his head, and other phantasmagorical characters.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
October 2016
Soldier's Tale, The
Bitef Theater

Although Company Club Guy’s production of The Soldier’s Tale uses Igor Stravinsky’s music, the play should not be confused with either the originally conceived ballet or the subsequently original staged drama. What is alike in the contemporary production staged for the Bitef Festival is that this theater piece combines spoken drama, music, and dance integrally to convey “travel through imaginary yet true events and emotions.”

In place of the original Russian folk tale is one that is told in monologues by a veteran contemporary soldier who faces a moral dilemma.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Trial of an American President, The
Lion Theater

A month before a presidential election seems like an appropriate time for The Trial of an American President by Dick Tarlow with Bill Smith at Theater Row's Lion Theatre. On trial is former United States President George W. Bush, and the question posed at the International Criminal Court in the Hague considers his guilt or innocence of extended crimes against the world. After 15 years of political and social discussion, will the former president be found guilty of war crimes and escalating the rage of terrorism after invading Iraq in 2003?

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Always Look on the Dark Side of Life
Glad Cafe

Working out of the back room of a funky bar in the south side of Glasgow, Graham de Banzie and Alex Cox have been doing their best to keep intimate theater alive in their home city. For the past three years, the partners have been mounting bi-monthly original stage works in the back room of the Glad Café, in front of audiences ranging from 20–60 people.

Always Look on the Dark Side of Life, their latest collaboration, is a typical production. De Banzie, a talented singer/guitarist, kicks things off with a couple of folk songs, then introduces the five actors.

Willard Manus
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Fiorello!
East 13th Street Theater

Gone and mostly forgotten in all but name – think LaGuardia Airport and the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts – is his eminence, Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1945), arguably the best mayor New York City ever had (1934-1945).

Thanks to Berkshire Theater Group which shipped us, cast and all, their highly touted summer hit musical from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the late great hizzoner is now back in town, this time singing, dancing and tipping his hat in a joyous, high-energy rival of Fiorello!

Edward Rubin
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Royale, The
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stiemke Studio

Young Milwaukee audiences who can’t recall the early days of this century and the furor over African-American boxer Jack Johnson’s match with a white heavyweight champion will certainly be familiar with the notion of race riots that Johnson’s victory caused. The Royale opens at Milwaukee Repertory Theater just weeks after the city was involved in a racially charged night of shooting, looting, and arson following the fatal police shooting of a black man.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, A
Studio Theater

Four adult single women, one Sunday morning and afternoon in St. Louis. The year is 1937. This is the set-up for one of Tennessee Williams’s final plays, written just a few years before his death. The rarely produced A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur offers the last of Williams’s famously familiar Southern belles, trapped in her own idealistic version of reality.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Freedom: The Most Expensive Capitalist Word
Bitef Theater

Based on the authors/performers’ research trip to Pyongyang, North Korea, their drama, Freedom: The Most Expensive Capitalist World, combined monologues, speeches interactive with the audience (including sales pitches) and with each other, and principally the film of their North Korean experience. They began with the notion that North Korea “is the last remnant of the Cold War” which could be examined as an “enemy” of the West according to stereotypical descriptions and propaganda.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Aubergine
Playwrights Horizons

Our essential love of food, its sensual and medicinal qualities, our essential connection to death and dying, its sensorial and spiritual qualities, play an important part in Aubergine, with its titled homage to eggplant. The gifted Julia Cho’s play may be overwritten and overindulgent and with more climaxes and codas than a Beethoven symphony, but it is a haunting exploration of how a son copes with the process of dying as it applies to his estranged father.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Happiest Place on Earth, The
The Greenhouse

Communicative dissonances are often evidenced when novelists attempt to write plays, but no less so when a playwright steps out of his comfort zone. There is no denying Philip Dawkins's talent for spinning complex yarns populated by diverse and vividly etched personalities, but documentary accounts mandate different rules of discourse than fiction, just as third-person narratives demand differences in structure from real-time live-action re-enactments.

Dawkins's entry in the Solo Celebration series contains the material for a good story—three or four, in fact.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
You on the Moors Now
Den Heath Mainstage

Unreconstructed jokesters who still derive amusement from invoking the so-called "battle of the sexes" may well consider retiring that divisive wheeze after viewing a genuine gender war, where those of Heart both Faint and Stout are wounded, sometimes going so far as to die, and nobody "wins" Fair anything.

Our heroines in You on the Moors Now are drawn from 19th-century literature: Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Catherine Earnshaw, and Louisa May Alcott's Josephine "Jo" March.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Comedical Tragedy for Mr. Punch, A
Chopin Theater

Grotesque human representations exercise a curious power, changing in seconds from objects of amusement to a source of menace.

On the creepiness scale, puppets generally rank below clowns and ventriloquists' dummies—with the exception of England's own Lord of Misrule, the 374-year-old Mister Punch.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Passage to India, A
Off the Wall Theater

The strong smell of incense as one walks into Off the Wall Theater in downtown Milwaukee is the first indication of the play’s locale: India. In fact, local theater impresario Dale Gutzman has taken on the task of writing an original stage adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, considered to be among the finest novels of the 20th century. The novel, written in 1924, was based on Forster’s own travels to India.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Day By the Sea, A
Becket Theater

It may take a long time, exactly the entire first act (of three) to bring us into the superb and commendably civilized core of N.C. Hunter’s play, but the rewards in the remaining two-thirds are considerable. Some may see its exposition as a direct link to Anton Chekhov, but what is wrong with that, considering the story that unfolds has a resonance that speaks as much to a then as it does to its now which for the play is England in 1953?

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Mechanics of Love
Paradise Factory

Mechanics of Love is a comedy by Dipika Guha, produced by To-By-For Productions. It’s about Glen, husband to Faizi and buddy to Georg, who marries Francesca. It seems that Glen has a condition – he forgets things. And he’s forgotten that he’s married to Faizi. We learn later that this isn’t his first bigamous blunder. “After the fourth wife, I got used to it,” Faizi tells Georg.

But a poor memory doesn’t account for all the play’s romance.

Steve Capra
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Grizzly Mama
Rivendell Theater Ensemble

The same audiences who make the mistake of assuming they are watching another quickly dated, political-themed comedy during its first act will be the ones howling in outrage when the stakes get serious—very, very serious—in its second. George Brant's reputation is based in his sleight-of-hand narrative, however, and playgoers gulled by his snappy repartee and physical hijinks have nobody but themselves to blame.

The prologue introduces us to soccer mom Deb Marshall in her cozy kitchen, cooking up a recipe requiring her to don a gas mask upon its completion.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Marie and Rosetta
Linda Gross Theater

Times are deplorable when you have to live in a funeral parlor and sleep in the caskets. That's how it was for traveling black gospel singers in 1946 Mississippi, even those as acclaimed as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Kecia Lewis) and as talented as her protégée Marie Knight (Rebecca Naomi Jones). Tharpe and Knight were two women who helped propel rhythm and blues into the rock 'n' roll fame of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jimi Hendrix.

The Atlantic Theater Company's Marie and Rosetta is George Brant's new bio-musical at the Linda Gross Theater.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Birds, The
59E59

Don't expect the deliciously elegant terror of Hitchcock's 1963 film, “The Birds,” in Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s 2009 more cerebral version at 59E59 Theaters. While McPherson turns to the original 1952 Daphne du Maurier short story and Hitchcock's film as springboards, the play takes a different focus. Going beyond surviving a terrifying world-wide attack by rogue birds, McPherson’s conceit focuses on doomed humans battling for survival and questioning the existence and need for God in the universe.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Fiorello!
East 13th Street Theater

The best and most probably generous way to enjoy this production of Fiorello! is to pretend you are not in New York City at the otherwise resident home of the Classic Stage Company but rather in retreat to Stockbridge, Mass where the Berkshire Theater Group first presented its revival of the wonderful but barely remembered 1959 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical this past summer. It is this production that has been move lock, stock, and barrel to East 13th Street for those who might like to see what a youthful, talented cast and company has done with it.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Birds, The
59E59 Theaters

If you are as curious as I to see how Conor McPherson’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” stacks up against Alfred Hitchcock’s scary and much discussed, if also inscrutable, film version, then head over to 59E59 where, in the,ir tiniest venue, you are squeezed into a tiny open space to feel the claustrophobia and the dread experienced by the play’s three characters. I must admit that I am not familiar with the short story (written in 1953) but have seen and enjoyed the film (1963) numerous times.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Cats
Neil Simon

Feline lovers, rejoice! Cats is back in town. The original production was highly touted in London before brought to Broadway in 1982. It made history by being performed for a record 18 years, some 7,485 performances in all. Only The Phantom of the Opera tops it in Broadway longevity. This production is a bit leaner; the theater is smaller than The Winter Garden, and the orchestra has been diminished.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Naperville
Theater Wit

There are two kinds of suburbs: those born of tract homes constructed on former cornfields and christened with names reflecting lofty fantasies (e.g., Rolling Meadows, Hoffman Estates), and those like Evanston and Wheaton, boasting full-service communities before mid-20th-century sprawl stereotyped all exurban settlements as ghettos for automobile-enslaved breeders.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
I Do Today
The Greenhouse

Our narrator's first words to her audience are "I could marry you." Before we look for an irate father brandishing a shotgun, however, she explains that, although raised Jewish, she is certified by the Church of Spiritual Humanism to perform marriage ceremonies — a call possibly inspired by her family's propensity for declaring wedlock the solution to every crisis of indecision and, therefore, a practice to be embraced impulsively and often.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Aubergine
Playwrights Horizons

The aubergine of the title is the shiny purple vegetable we call “eggplant.” It’s a gift to Ray (Tim Kang), a troubled chef who reluctantly agrees to take his father (Stephen Park) home to die. Lucien (Michael Potts), the hospice worker in charge of the case, explains that he prefers the French name, because it more closely matches the beauty of the plant. Lucien has seen a lot of death and dying, not only because of his job, but also in the refugee camps in his native Africa.

Michall Jeffers
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill
Milwaukee Repertory Theater - Stackner Cabaret

For those who were born too late to encounter the real-life jazz singer Billie Holiday, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is a terrific recreation of one of Holiday’s final appearances. The cast includes only two people: Holiday (Alexis J. Roston), who sings onstage in a small, run-down Philadelphia nightclub, and her current watchdog and pianist, Jimmy Powers (Abdul Hamid Royal).

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Dutchman / TRANSit
The Greenhouse

The map on the wall of the train car, the empty seats, and the advertisements for Burma-Shave indicate that we are in New York City on an early evening during the mid-20th century for the first in this double bill of plays. Amiri Baraka's career-making 1964 one-act, Dutchman, recounts how black corporate Clay is lured by white free-spirit Lula's seductive banter into sharing an erotic fantasy that turns suddenly ugly following the entrance of other passengers.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Streetcar Named Desire, A
The Players Center

Director Elliott Raines has made sure no one mistakes his take on A Streetcar Named Desire is in any way tied to the famous movie version. Brunette Blanche (Alana Opie) may be mentally deteriorating, but her sturdy build and posture and spring-patterned dress belie her condition. She seems fit to be protector of her slight blond younger sister Stella (sweet Lauren Ward) with whom she’s come to stay in New Orleans after losing their ancestral estate. Also her last home and job.

Marie J. Kilker
Date Reviewed:
September 2016
Rose
The Greenhouse

Once upon a time, a young couple fleeing poverty and starvation emigrated to the United States seeking their fortune in the great city of Boston.

Like most recently arrived ethnic minorities, they were shunned by their neighbors initially. Over decades of determined assimilation, the descendants of these proud settlers rose to positions of power, until a third-generation son, impatient with his progenitors' slow progress, vowed to sire a succession of leaders to the entire nation. His ambitions were fulfilled — but not without terrible sacrifice.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2016
Good Friday
Oracle Theater

Our prologue in Good Friday presents us with a line-up of multiethnic young women dressed in underwear. After examining their bodies, they don street clothes and depart. We next see them in a classroom, ostensibly discussing Ibsen's A Doll's House but mostly engaging in the sort of pecking-order games employed by playwrights nowadays to assure us that smart, educated, third-wave feminist "scholaristas" can still behave like seventh-graders.

Gunfire is heard outside.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed:
August 2016
Marie and Rosetta
Atlantic Theater - Linda Gross Theater

A funeral home in Mississippi doesn’t sound like the ideal sleeping quarters, but it works just fine for gospel singer/guitar player Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Kecia Lewis), and her new acquaintance and partner-to-be singer/pianist Marie Knight (Rebecca Naomi Jones). Finding lodging is always a problem for blacks in the south, but here they intend to not only get a good night’s sleep among the coffins but do a little rehearsing, as well.

Simon Saltzman
Date Reviewed:
August 2016

Pages