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Review: Liberation at James Earl Jones Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Years ago, I got into an argument with a millennial-age man about feminism. His view was that women just had to wait until the “old sexist guys” died out and that time would come, eventually. And I recall asking, not without some anger, how long I should have to wait to be treated equally?
Generational conversations about feminism are central to Bess Wohl’s sweeping play Liberation about second wave feminism. In it, her Gen X narrator looks back at her mother’s generation of feminists and wants...
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Review: The Honey Trap at Irish Repertory Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

The history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland is a sticky subject to say the least. Leo McGann’s new play, The Honey Trap, focuses on the impact of that conflict on the British soldiers who were sent there. The result is a play with some implausible plot twists and an unfortunate flattening of complex subjects. Some of the most interesting elements are left to the fringe of the story being told.
In the present day, British solider Dave (Michael Hayden) has agreed to be interviewed by historian...
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Review: The Wild Duck at TFANA - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” For Ibsen, in The Wild Duck he speaks of characters telling themselves “life lies.” The characters in the play are surviving and managing, holding things together in their world with small (and big) lies that preserve their mental and physical peace. But Ibsen unleashes upon this peace a toxic truthteller who wreaks havoc on not only the tranquility but a family by pulling at the bonds between them. Unravelling these threads, has t...
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Review: Can I Be Frank? at Soho Playhouse - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Near the start of the show, Can I Be Frank?, queer, nonbinary performer Morgan Bassichis calls to stage manager Gloria in the booth to make notes and changes to the show.
They say what we are watching is a work-in-progress and they are belatedly scrambling to give the audience more context for a Frank Maya monologue they are performing about Liberace.
But the shambolic fumbling is scripted. As for the needed context, I guess I needed a lot more.
Can I Be Frank? is a one-person show written and p...
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Review: Out of Order at East Village Basement - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Carl Holder’s show Out of Order leaves its structure to the fates.
Dubbed “an interactive parlor game,” Holder writes a series of prompts on index cards.  They fall from the ceiling scattering. He opens them up in whatever order he finds them and performs the tasks as he comes to them.
He says this was his approach to turning 40 and dealing with writer’s block. He couldn’t write a play, so he’s created this performance-by-lotto instead.
The instructions on the cards range from character prompts...
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Review: Cold War Choir Practice at Clubbed Thumb - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice is a Reagan-era time capsule of 1980s nuclear threats, self-actualization cults, spies and toy fads (Pound Puppies!). Between eccentric songs about Christmas and Armageddon, this spirited play with music, is also about power, resilience, and Black community. With a winning performance from Alana Raquel Bowers, it is also a pathway into the mind of a young Black girl managing anxiety, family, and disappointment.
Set in Syracuse in 1987, 10-year-old Meek (Alana...
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Review: Bus Stop at Classic Stage Company - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Midori Francis gives a layered, glittering performance in William Inge’s Bus Stop, in a co-production from NAATCO, Classic Stage Company, and Transport Group. While it may not be a complete heartstopper of a play, there are flickering moments of human frailty in this dramedy of lonely, lost folks stuck at a roadside diner for a night in a snow storm. Director Jack Cummings III’s production offers some subtle performances even if Inge’s material is more on-the-nose.
It is 1955 in Kansas. Still-ma...
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Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray at The Music Box - Exeunt Magazine NYC

In a swirl of sweat, wigs, and live projections, Sarah Snook plays a flurry of Oscar Wilde’s characters—26 to be exact—in the campy take on hedonism, vanity, morality, and sin that is The Picture of Dorian Gray.
This tech-centric production is full of anachronisms, self-awareness, and excess. Adaptor and director Kip Williams wants to put the idea of the performance of life at the center of the piece. Though with a celebrity on stage, it shifts the focus. It becomes less about our performative s...
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Review: Good Night and Good Luck at Winter Garden Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

The screen-to-stage adaptation of Good Night and Good Luck ends up being a good fit for theater. The play is snappy while still a bit lecturing, frustrating and yet fascinating. Director David Cromer captures the movement and verve of live television on stage and layers the stage in a way that mimics edits in cinema seamlessly. The ensemble piece about this moment in history provides a solid dose of drama, though the play strains when it tries to connect to our present moment.
The play, written...
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Review: Ghosts at Lincoln Center Theater - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Playwright Henrik Ibsen is known for writing some remarkable women for the stage including Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler. While his play Ghosts might be less well-known, it boasts of another unique creature faced with terrible choices in a world stacked against women. Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s new adaptation of Ghosts distills Ibsen’s vision further along with Lily Rabe’s resilient and caustic performance.
O’Rowe’s version of the play is more minimalist in language than Ibsen’s so the tragic...
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Review: Redwood at Nederlander Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

With the massive projection screens being used in the new musical Redwood, I had an unexpected flashback to my childhood. I remember seeing a 360-degree immersive documentary in Walt Disney World.  As I recall, it was some sort of travelogue (was it about Canada? America?). It was a little dizzying and confusing because you did not know which way to look and with no narrative (or none I can remember) I recall tiring of it after a bit.  The coolness of the experience wore off.
I may have left Red...
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Review: My Man Kono at ART/NY Theater - Exeunt Magazine NYC

From the silent age of cinema to the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Philip W. Chung’s play, My Man Kono, about real life figure Toraichi Kono, gives a unique perspective on Kono’s experiences being Japanese in America in the first half of the twentieth century.  It’s a fascinating slice of history from a volatile era—but the play’s narrow lens on Kono and Charlie Chaplin’s working relationship and a limiting retrospective structure pushes some rich cultural history to the backend of th...
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Review: English at Todd Haimes Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

The process of learning a new language can be an act of invasion. Shaping your mouth, tongue, and brain for this new form of expression starts to change who you are behind the voice speaking. And learning English in this global economy is becoming less of a choice and sometimes it is a political necessity.
In Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English, about students in an English class in Iran, it is hard not feel a profound loss at the end of the play knowing how language creates gaps...
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the beautiful land i seek (la linda tierra que busco yo) at Pregones PRTT - Exeunt Magazine NYC

In Matthew Barbot’s play about Puerto Rican history, the beautiful land i seek (la linda tierra que busco yo), at some point West Side Story’s Maria is singing and crying over the body of Christopher Columbus surrounded by a whole lot of rolls of paper towels.
As you can imagine, this sets a certain satirical tone within this sincere and funny play that looks at political activism, Puerto Rican independence, and what generations of repeated colonization and oppression fosters. Director José Zaya...
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Review: This is My Favorite Song at Playwrights Horizons - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Comedian Francesa D’Uva’s father died in June 2020 from COVID. He was in a coma in a hospital on a ventilator where his family could not visit him.
It is not the easiest starting place for the autobiographical show, This is My Song.  Frankly, D’Uva knows this.
She sings at one point “I don’t want to do this show.”  But her “talent representatives” have pushed her to do so. Part of the show is about getting back on the creativity horse after her loss and trying to figure out how to be funny or do...
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Shit. Meet. Fan. at MCC Theater - Exeunt Magazine NYC

At some point in Robert O’Hara’s new play Shit. Meet. Fan. the audience is so riled up, laughing and gasping at every reveal, it feels like the heyday of the Jerry Springer show.  O’Hara wants to set a trap to unconsciously lure the audience into a pleasurable wallowing in other people’s shit but then turn the spotlight back on the audience.
He says the play is “a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.”  Those intentions are clear but he does not successfully skewer his s...
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Review: Yellow Face at Todd Haimes Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

In David Henry Hwang’s play Yellow Face, the playwright is weighing all sorts of contradictions in  fictionalized version of himself and wrestling with generational perspectives on Asian American activism and identity. This 2007 play, revived now in a production directed by Leigh Silverman, is a semi-autobiographical satire but also an interrogation of yellow face casting, Asian American identity, and the oppressive force of white America on Asian Americans.
It is funny and messy, and not withou...
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Review: The Voices in Your Head at St. Lydia's - Exeunt Magazine NYC

If life can take many different forms, it makes sense that so can grief. There is no one way to process loss. But The Voices in Your Head, created by Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee, reminds us that sometimes humor can be a tonic, especially at this “anti-grief” support group.
With an audience of around 20, held in an inclusive church in Brooklyn, St. Lydia’s, it’s an intimate site-specific setting (it becomes St. Lidwina’s in the play). We are seated in the support group circle (though there is...
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Review: Table 17 at MCC Theater - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Set around a reunion of exes this new play lacks the fun and sparks it needs. Nicole Serratore reviews. I’ve often wondered why there aren’t more romance plays. Sadly Douglas Lyons’s comedy-romance Table 17 does not make the strongest case for them. Even with the always riveting Kara Young, the play is a shallow exploration of relationships, love, and romance. With wispy characters, mild laughs, and cringey dialogue, it’s hard to root for this couple at all.
Jada (Kara Young) and Dallas (Biko Ei...
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Review: someone spectacular at The Pershing Square Signature Center - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Looking back on 2024, I have inadvertently programmed myself a cycle of grief plays. How did this happen? Perhaps in the aftermath (ongoing) COVID pandemic it is a subject that more playwrights have gravitated towards unpacking lately.
My mileage with these plays has varied greatly. From the strangely funny Grief Hotel to the awkwardly, mystical Find Me Here to the memoir-style of Lorenzo to this new play, someone spectacular by Doménica Feraud, which tries to be funny and a little mystical, but...
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Review: Inspired by True Events at Theatre 154 - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Zig-zagging through theatrical genres and styles this new play does not know where to land. Nicole Serratore reviewsStage managers handle a lot. In this new play by Ryan Spahn, Inspired by True Events, the stage manager at Rochester Community Theater ends up dealing with issues well outside the bounds of what Equity expects and then some. She may be cleaning up the green room, brewing coffee, and chasing away mice but there are much bigger problems in store.
Falling somewhere between a real-time...
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Review: Isabel at Abrons Arts Center

reid tang’s new play exists in a jiggly universe full of unpredictable concepts and images but meaning is harder to ascribe to it. Nicole Serratore reviews.

reid tang’s play Isabel is awash with unpredictable images and concepts. Time is not linear. The play is constantly redefining that which we see. For instance, a human sibling once known as Harriet using “he” pronouns might suddenly become a backpack named Loaves Chapman who is a “she.” One must give into the play’s jiggly universe and the
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Review: Find Me Here at Clubbed Thumb

Crystal Finn’s new play, Find Me Here, is full of characters searching for meaning in life and death but it is less legible in what it delivers in that quest. It is a jumbled amalgamation of characters musing on big themes in personal ways, but the mystical energy in the play just fizzles in Caitin Sullivan’s muted production.

Three sisters have gathered to read their father’s will. Deborah (Kathleen Tolan) has been in a cult for 30 years and is estranged from her late parents and her sons. Nan
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Review: What Became of Us at Atlantic Stage 2

Shayan Lotfi’s frustrating new play about sibling dynamics across diasporic cultures strains under the weight of its ambitious remit. The play is staged with alternating casts–first Rosalind Chao and BD Wong then Tony Shalhoub and Shohreh Aghdashloo.

The actor pairs play siblings with immigrant parents from an unnamed country. It’s sets up an interesting writing challenge to allow for actors of varying ethnic identities to play the roles, but, in reality, the writing ends up trapped by the conc
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