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Review: Joe Turner's Come and Gone at Barrymore Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

There is a thunder crack in the middle of August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In that moment, the hairs on my neck stood up and a chill ran through my body.
You need not believe in god or any form of spiritualism. But there is a sense of the metaphysical that pulses through Wilson’s play and is well-captured by director Debbie Allen’s transportive production.
Originally written in 1988, it is the second chapter in August Wilson’s Century Cycle. Set in 1911, Bertha (Taraji P. Henson)...
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Review: Fallen Angels at Todd Haimes Theatre - Exeunt Magazine NYC

Fallen Angels is a Noel Coward comedy centered around women, desire, friendship, and booze. It was wildly ahead of its time getting nearly banned when it was written in 1923 with its talk of premarital sex. While there is fizzy pleasure in the two female friends barely holding it together as they wait with bubbling anticipation of their past lover, something about Scott Ellis’ production just lags.
Set among bluebloods in London in 1928, Julia (Kelli O’Hara) sends her husband Fred (Aasif Mandvi)...
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Review: Voyage Into Infinity at NYU Skirball - Exeunt Magazine NYC

I was looking forward to seeing Narcissister’s work again after a number of years. But this large scale take on “collapse” called Voyage Into Infinity, as part of the Under the Radar festival, just felt empty and repetitive.
It is meant to pay homage to the 1987 video (transferred to 16mm film) The Way Things Go by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss where they filmed a series of actions using Rube Goldberg machines.
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Review: Kanjincho at Japan Society - Exeunt Magazine NYC

It’s that time of year again. The January Theater festivals kick off and with it bring unique works from around the world.
As part of Under the Radar and presented by Japan Society, Kanjincho by Japanese theater company Kinoshita Kabuki is a modern take on a kabuki classic involving injustice, borders, mercy, and sacrifice.
In a moment where much of the world is hellbent on stopping people from crossing borders, this show knows it is speaking to certain xenophobic attitudes in Japan and around t...
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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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