Off-B'way Update: Atlantic Season

The family musical Finn at Kennedy Center
before Trump (or his minions) pulled the plug.
Credit: Teresa Wood

Atlantic Theater Company has announced its 2026-27 season schedule which includes world premieres by Lucas Hnath (Dana H., A Doll's House, Part 2), Clare Barron (You Got Older), Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview), and Mona Pirnot (I Assume You Know David Greenspan). The company is currently presenting Bubba Weiler's The Saviors. Their fall season opens with Pirnot's I Became We (Oct. 16--Nov. 15) with music by Jack D. Coen and lyrics by Pirnot and Coen. This is a one-person monologue performed by a 30-person choir. 

Atlantic will also present children's theater with Finn, a family musical whose Kennedy Center tour was cancelled when Trump took over the venue, supposedly because it promoted tolerance of those who are different from you. (Dec. 12-Jan. 31 at Atlantic Theater Stage 2).

Deirdre O'Connell in Dana H.
Credit: Carol Rosegg

Next is Clare Barron's Too Bad for Her (Jan. 9-Feb. 14) about a 30-year affair. Anne Kauffman (The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window) directs. Lucas Hnath's Old Actress follows (March 18--April 25) reuniting him with his Dana H. star Deirdre O'Connell and director Les Waters. O'Connell won a Tony Award for playing a version of Hnath's mother. The play is described as a meta-threatrical experience about learning lines for a show.

The final attraction will be Push from Pulitzer Prize winner Jackie Sibblies Drury (May 27-July 3) with direction from Justin Peck and choreography by Peck and Patricia Degado, about the American premiere of a Russian defecting dancer and the American choreographer creating a piece for him. Set in 1976, it sounds a bit like it could be modeled on Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp.

Off-B'way Reviews: Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.; Wine in the Wilderness

Adelind Horan, Ayana Workman, Sathya Sridharan,
and Japeth Balaban in Glass.
Credit: Joan Marcus

You never know what you’re going to get with a Caryl Churchill play, but it’s sure to be something unique, thought-provoking, and convention-breaking. After exploring gender and racial barriers in Cloud 9, the clash of capitalism and feminism in Top Girls, financial turmoil in Serious Money, magic and demons in The Skirker, cloning in A Number, and numerous other topics in bizarre and weird ways, she tackles the power of legends, myths, and metaphor in a quartet of odd but affecting one-acts, Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. at the Public Theater. 

The first three playlets are short and explosive, detonating like miniature bombs. Director James MacDonald has separated them with entertaining circus acts, performed with winning charm by balancing whiz Junru Wang and expert juggler Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These fun interludes act as palate cleansers between Churchill’s short unusual dramatic courses. Glass concerns a girl made of glass (played with appropriate delicacy and yearning by Ayana Workman). She is easily breakable and transparent, not just physically but emotionally. MacDonald stages the play on a narrow ledge, emphasizing the precarious space the girl occupies. There is no special costume or effect to convey her crystalline condition, MacDonald and Churchill ask us to use our imagination as she converses with the family clock, a ceramic dog and a vase on the need to remain still on a shelf. She falls for an equally vulnerable boy (tender Japhet Balaban), who is victimized by an abusive father. The climax of this bitter fairy tale is shattering, literally and figuratively. 

Deirdre O'Connell in Kill.
Credit: Joan Marcus

The powerful Deirdre O’Connell represents “Gods” in the following piece Kill, a Beckett-like monologue. Costume designer Enver Chakartash has clad her in a silvery suit with the suggestion of wings and she is seated on a suspended cloud. After stating that the gods do not exist, she launches on an epic retelling of the numerous tragedies surrounding the House of Atreus. Phrases detailing the murders within Agamemnon’s family and the endless slaughters that followed are repeated emphasizing the senselessness of death in the name of the deities. (The repetitions and circular nature of the speech reminded me of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot.) O’Connell’s character is a symbol for the made-up supreme beings of mythologies used to explain humanity’s inhumanity. O’Connell delivers this tirade with a leavening of humor and growing passion which finally erupts in an explosion of anger at the useless killing.

B'way Update: Job Transfers; Marin Ireland's Pre-Existing Condition

Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon
in Job
Credit: Emilio Madrid

Job, the hit Off-Broadway two-character play by Max Wolf Friedlich, will make the leap to Broadway this summer. Performances begin July 15 at the Hayes Theater in advance of a July 30 opening for a limited run through Sept. 29. Sydney Lemmon and Peter Friedman will repeat their performances as a recently-fired big tech company employee and her crisis management therapist. 

According to the press release, the plot is described as follows: “Jane (Lemmon), an employee at a big tech company (you know the one), has been placed on leave after becoming the subject of a viral video. She arrives in the office of a crisis therapist – Loyd (Friedman) – determined to be reinstated to the job that gives her life meaning. Job zooms in on two careerists of different generations, genders, and political paradigms to examine what it means to be a citizen of the internet and our obligation to help the people who need it most.”

B'way Update: Dana and Room To Play in Rep, Etc.

The new post-shutdown Broadway season just got really interesting. In an unexpected and startlingly different move, two highly-praised, but bizarre Off-Broadway plays will transfer to Broadway to be performed in repertory. Tina Satter's Is This A Room and Lucas Hnath's Dana H. will alternate performances at the Lyceum Theater with the former beginning previews on Sept. 24 and opening Oct. 11 and the latter commencing previews on Oct. 1 and 

 Is This a Room? (top) and Dana H (bottom)
will alternate performances at 
Broadway's Lyceum Theatre
(Credits: Carol Rosegg; Craig Schwartz)

opening Oct. 17. The dual-show engagement will play until Jan. 16, 2022. Both plays were presented at Vineyard Theater as part of the foreshortened 2019-20 season.  

Each presentation is unique and not your typical Broadway fare. Is This A Room, directed and conceived by Satter, concerns the real-life Reality Winner (her actual name), an Air Force linguist who was imprisoned for leaking information that the Russians interfered in our 2016 Presidential election. The entire 70-minute play is composed of transcripts from her FBI interrogation and the search of her home. Emily Davis repeats her stunning performance as Reality. She won an Obie and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and the production won a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience.

Dana H. is also based on actual events and transcripts. The playwright's mother Dana was abducted and held captive in a series of Florida motels for five months. Deirdre O'Connell lip-synchs to recordings of an interview conducted with the real-life Dana and directed by Obie winner Les Waters. The production was interrupted by the COVID shut-down and O'Connell won the Obie, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Circle awards. 

Theater Awards and Streaming in the Age of COVID

Theater and the arts continue despite the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday was

Performers in Take Me to the World:
A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration
Credit: Broadway.com

commemorated with Take Me to the World, a spectacular web-based quilt of performances presented by Broadway.com on April 26 and now available on YouTube. Though live performances on or Off-Broadway may not return for months, the annual award-dispensing free-for-all goes on, in different forms. The only prize-giving entity not heard from as of yet is the biggest of them all, the Tony Awards. This shows the fundamental difference between the Tonys and all other awards. While the Drama Desks, Outer Critics, Obies and Lortels are voted on by relatively small groups of Gotham-based critics and some industry insiders who will have seen all the eligible shows, a significant portion of the Tony electorate is made up of out-of-town road producers who come into New York at the end of the season to view as many candidates as possible. With no shows on, these people can't vote for anything. (The rest of the Tony voters are NYC producers, the board members of the various theatrical unions and about 20 members of the New York Drama Critics Circle.) In addition, the Tonys are not only a ceremony to honor artistic excellence, they are also a commercial TV venture to push Broadway's product. Again if there are no shows to push, CBS and the producers have no reason to put on a show, even a digital one with presenters and winners Zooming in.