From Describe the Night. Watching the deliberate, origami-like unfolding of Rajiv Joseph’s dense and fascinating new play Describe the Night, directed by Giovanna Sardelli at Atlantic Theater Company, I found myself thinking of a tiger. Not the tiger you might expect, meaning the one at the center of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which earned Joseph wide acclaim and a finalist nod for the 2010 Pulitzer. No — I was thinking of the tiger in The Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s novel about a young Indian boy who survives for 227 days on a raft after a shipwreck, with that great striped beast as his only companion … or does he?
Suzan-Lori Parks has a lot of nerve. A few years back she wrote and organized something she called “365 Days/365 Plays,” which really was what its name suggested. Before that, in Topdog/Underdog, she put onstage a pair of black brothers who made their livings impersonating Lincoln and Booth, assassination included. (She won the Pulitzer Prize for it.) Her take on The Scarlet Letter, or rather one of her takes, was titled Fucking A.
David Greenspan, the only performer in this Strange Interlude. When Eugene O’Neill finished Strange Interlude in 1923, he was 35 years old, the same age as his heroine Nina Leeds in the seventh act out of nine in his paradigm-shifting, Pulitzer Prize–winning, six-hour domestic epic. “I can’t believe it,” says Nina, “I’m 35 … five years more … at 40 a woman has finished living … life passes by her … she rots away in peace!
From The Wolves, at Lincoln Center. The Wolves are back in town.
Last summer, Sarah DeLappe’s play about an indoor girls’ soccer team — the young playwright’s first work to be professionally staged — started sending shockwaves through the New York theater scene. Its sold-out Off Broadway premiere at the Playwrights Realm was soon followed by an equally sold-out return engagement, Obie and Drama Desk awards for the play’s ensemble cast, and a host of other accolades, including a finalist nod for the 2017 Drama Pulitzer.
Way We Get By, The Second Stage Theatre Cast List: Thomas Sadoski, Amanda Seyfried Production Credits: Neil LaBute (playwright) Leigh Silverman (director) In a Pottery Barned New York apartment, a postcoital couple awakens in the wee hours and stumbles through a discussion about their future. Have we not seen this before? Doug (an unrecognizably ripped Thomas Sadoski) wants to go for it, grab for the brass ring — or even the gold one — and take the big chance on love.
Unless cunnilingus is part of the late Victorian housekeeping routine, the studly footman and nubile maid seem to have seriously misinterpreted the task of straightening the bed. How daring of David Hare to begin The Judas Kiss — his play about Oscar Wilde — with such an explicit act of heterosexuality. And yet how dangerous, too. In the drama’s desultory 1998 Broadway debut, starring Liam Neeson, this feint seemed like bad foreplay: a halfhearted apology for all the gayness about to transpire.
From Sarah Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, at Lincoln Center. Typically, Sarah Ruhl’s plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the plots are not especially logical, the characters often seem freaked out by the situations they face and the new thoughts they are hatching. In The Oldest Boy, a play about parental attachment, the three-year-old son of an ordinary American womanmay be the incarnation of the next Dalai Lama.
From The Treasurer, at Playwrights Horizons. Max Posner’s The Treasurer, now playing at Playwrights Horizons under the assured and gentle direction of David Cromer, is a quiet revelation. At a moment when the theatrical landscape is dense with new plays that haven’t quite figured out why they’re not TV — when we struggle to dramatize the realities of our lives without trapping ourselves inside stiflingly realistic dioramas — The Treasurer arrives as an antidote.
Tavi Gevinson and Michael Cera in This Is Our Youth, at the Cort. Photo by Brigitte Lacombe Michael Cera, he of the turtle face and pipe-cleaner arms, has cornered the market on screen nerdism to the point you would think there was nothing left for him to mine from the indignations of the socially awkward. Turns out, given material deep enough, there is. He’s found that material in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, and under Anna D.
In 1981, after seeing a very bad play called The Whales of August, I invented a party game. The rules are simple: Using nouns that don’t belong together — one of which ideally suggests the sad passage of time — create a portentous but nonsensical title for a future television-type stage drama. My favorites until today were November’s Carburetor and The Last Gesundheit of Indian Summer. But ladies and gentlemen, we have a new winner in The Velocity of Autumn.