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    13 Off Broadway Shows to Tempt You in April

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    New short plays by Caryl Churchill, a comedy with one erstwhile Derry Girl and a musical starring Anika Noni Rose — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.Theater in New York is nearing its seasonal crescendo, with stages Off Broadway and beyond teeming with activity. Of the many notable productions happening in April, here is a baker’s dozen to tantalize you.‘All the World’s a Stage’The composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, best known for the chamber musical “Ordinary Days” and more recently for the charming “Macbeth” riff “Scotland, PA,” sets his new musical in the 1990s in a conservative small town, where a gay high school teacher is helping a student to prepare for a statewide theater competition. With a cast of four that includes Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”), Jonathan Silverstein directs for Keen Company — his swan-song production as artistic director of the theater, which commissioned this musical. (Through May 10, Theater Row)‘Danger and Opportunity’The Obie Award-winning director Jack Serio loves intimate, nontraditional venues — like the lofts where he staged his breakthrough production of “Uncle Vanya” — and he has one for this new play by Ken Urban (“Nibbler”). With the audience at close range, arrayed around a living-room-like space, Ryan Spahn and Juan Castano play a married couple enduring a sexual dry spell, and Julia Chan plays the long-lost high school girlfriend whose reappearance rattles their relationship. (Through April 20, East Village Basement)‘Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.’A major production of any Caryl Churchill play becomes a reason for pilgrimage by the faithful. Now here is a program of four brief works by the 86-year-old playwright, a master of shape-shifting and the short form; three are from 2019, one from 2021. Her longtime interpreter James Macdonald, who staged Churchill’s “Top Girls” on Broadway, directs a large cast that includes the Tony Award winner Deirdre O’Connell and John Ellison Conlee. (Through May 11, Public Theater)Bailey Williams, left, and Emma Horwitz in their production of “Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods.”Lee Rayment‘Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods’The cleverly inventive, very funny playwrights Emma Horwitz (“Mary Gets Hers”) and Bailey Williams (“Events,” “Coach Coach”) are also the performers of this comedy, which appeared in an earlier form at last year’s Exponential Festival of experimental work. A co-production of New Georges, which incubated the show, and Rattlestick Theater, it is directed by Tara Elliott. (Through April 26, Here Arts Center)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Amerikin’ Review: A White Supremacist’s Undoing: DNA

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      The protagonist of Chisa Hutchinson’s new play is proud of his racial heritage, until he gets some unexpected test results.There was a guy I knew when I was in my teens. Blond and blue-eyed, popular at the beach, he named his puppy after a superstar. It made him laugh to let people in on the gut-punch nasty joke behind it: that, as far as he was concerned, both were black female dogs.Chisa Hutchinson’s layered new play, “Amerikin,” has me thinking about that for the first time in decades. Her central character, Jeff, has named his own dog in the same spirit — after a racist slur that he is not shy about shouting into the neighborhood to summon his pup. I’d hate for anyone to think that detail was too exaggerated. Not in these United States it isn’t.Directed by Jade King Carroll for Primary Stages, “Amerikin” is set in Sharpsburg, Md., which was Confederate country back when the bloody Battle of Antietam was waged nearby during the Civil War. In 2017, it is Trump country, and when the working-class Jeff (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), take their newborn son home, Jeff is eager to give the child he adores every social advantage in their small town.If that means accepting an invitation from his pal Dylan (Luke Robertson) to join the local white supremacist group, Jeff would be honored. It would bolster his sense of belonging in this place where he’s lived since childhood.But his nomination comes with an asterisk: He must take a DNA test to prove that he is 100 percent white. To his alarm, the results say otherwise — and even though his tech-savvy best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal), doctors the results, word gets out.And you know what happens when a band of white racists discovers a nonwhite family living in its midst. As Gerald (Victor Williams), a reporter for The Washington Post, frames it in a headline: “White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Artists, Then (as in the 17th Century) and Now

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      “The Light and the Dark” dramatizes the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, while “300 Paintings” was born during the fever dreams of Covid.Quick! Which 17th-century female artist fought her way into the male-dominated art world, prevailed in a rape trial and alchemized her struggles into revolutionary art? If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.Heavy emphasis on “introduction.” Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.There are two Artemisias in the show: the historical Baroque painter and a docent-like narrator. Both are played by Hamill, who has unwisely asked the narrator to ride shotgun to the artist. Under the slack direction of Jade King Carroll, “The Light and the Dark” often feels more like an art history lecture than a play. The first act, especially, hews much too closely to biographical exposition. Standing next to a blank canvas on a set that evokes of an artist’s studio, Artemisia talks to us about the art of composition before taking us back in time to her youth.As a child, she idolizes first the work of her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, posed like an off-duty Greek statue), then Caravaggio, whose works of fleshy realism crack the world open for her. The entrance of Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldivar), a papal painter who frequents Orazio’s studio, spells trouble. He contrives to spend more time alone with Artemisia; during one of his visits, after he has bribed the Gentileschi’s serving woman (a versatile Joey Parsons) to vacate the room, he rapes Artemisia.Strangely, no mention is made of her three younger brothers, who also trained as apprentices to Orazio and who might have served as dramatic counterpoints for the young female artist.More consequentially, Hamill, who is one of the most produced playwrights in the country, departs from the historical record in a trial scene. Court records of the rape trial preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Rome show that Artemisia averred that she threw a knife at Tassi after he raped her the first time; in the play, she simply lets it drop by her side. “I am not a heroine of some old story. I cannot hold the knife,” she says meekly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country

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      The Off Broadway plays “Fatherland” and “Blood of the Lamb” explore the grief, anger and fear of no longer recognizing the country you love.When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In Charles Busch’s ‘Ibsen’s Ghost,’ a Widow’s Work is Never Done

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      In Charles Busch’s satire of Henrik Ibsen’s plays, a widow faces a rather catty fight to save her husband’s legacy.Like “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola’s hysterical take on Mary Todd Lincoln, Charles Busch’s “Ibsen’s Ghost” follows a notable woman of yore — Suzannah Ibsen, the wife of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen — whose corseted unknowability is mined for mischief. Subtitled “An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy,” this Primary Stages production, in association with George Street Playhouse, at 59E59 Theaters takes what few details are known about Suzannah, a driving force in the playwright’s productivity, and turns her into a campy diva.The show opens with a widowed Suzannah, saucily played by Busch, mourning the loss of a “conjugal partner of inexhaustible pyrotechnics.” She soon learns how inexhaustible he really was: Hanna (Jennifer Van Dyck), one of Ibsen’s many apparent lovers, emerges and announces her intention to print her scandalous diaries.Let the catty turmoil commence.An affair is one thing, but Suzannah can’t abide Hanna’s claim that she — not Suzannah — inspired Ibsen’s feminist icon, Nora Helmer, in “A Doll’s House.” Hanna’s plan also interferes with Suzannah’s attempt to publish 50 years worth of the couple’s personal letters. But, in another blow, Ibsen’s publisher (Christopher Borg) finds their domestic contents too boring to print.Busch, a master of clutching pearls and fluttering eyelashes, has great fun playing varying states of dismay. Manic, glitch-like tics betray his Suzannah’s matronly composition, and she shocks herself with her indignity. As Hanna’s crusade moves forward, Suzannah becomes even haughtier, hurling vintage insults (“You brazen jezebel!”) across Shoko Kambara’s tasteful, turn-of-the-century drawing room set.Ibsen’s dramas, heavy on ruinous secrets his characters try to conceal, turn out to be perfect for Busch to cherry-pick in sketching this show. There’s a little bit of “Ghosts,” with the appearance of an illegitimate child (Thomas Gibson) and a bawdy, scene-stealing maid (Jen Cody) whose spinal disorder causes her to walk with a ridiculous pelvic thrust.Even Ibsen’s lesser known “Little Eyolf” receives some love when Borg returns as another character, a mysterious figure known as the Rat Wife. Pulling from Suzannah’s actual biography, Busch turns her stepmother (Judy Kaye, beautifully at home with Busch’s affected dialogue) into a vamp, a calculating governess who puts the moves on Suzannah’s father. And between the maid’s almost Transylvanian accent, Hanna’s British lilt and the publisher’s Swedish Chef garbles, a treasure trove of tonal absurdity fills the air.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Artificial Flavors’ Review: Blame ChatGPT for This Musical

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      Each performance culminates in a production, composed on the spot, with misguided help from artificial intelligence.Artificial intelligence can paint meddlesome monkeys, speak in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones and play a tune to suit a hall of mirrors. But it can’t write a musical that doesn’t feel canned (at least, not yet). That’s the argument put forward by “Artificial Flavors,” a live demonstration of A.I.’s creative capabilities — and tedious limitations — at 59E59 Theaters.The writer and director Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the restlessly curious company the Civilians, here assumes the role of a somewhat befuddled narrator, explaining that this project was born from his late-night tinkering with programs like ChatGPT. Cosson, who says he is not a performer, at times doesn’t seem to know where to stand or what to say next. Whether or not it’s an act (and I suspect that it is), Cosson’s apparent insecurity provides a stark contrast to the technology he is investigating.Cosson solicits Mad Libs-style audience input to show that generative A.I. merely needs prompting and a few seconds to spit out an unconvincing Picasso or write vaguely in the voice of Stephen King, examples projected on a screen. Six actors then step in to perform A.I.-generated skits, including a scene between socialist comrades quibbling over a Birkin bag on the night I attended. Cosson promises that each performance of “Artificial Flavors” will culminate in a brand-new musical, with text written by ChatGPT and melodies composed on the spot by the Civilians and the onstage music director Dan Lipton.The problem is that every example of A.I.-generated content proceeding it portends how bad that musical will be. That seems to be Cosson’s point, though it becomes tiresome as his experiment balloons to 90 minutes. What scant humor A.I. produces here is inadvertent and its metaphors are clichéd. (“We’re more than gears, circuits and wires,” one early sample lyric goes, “We are the spark igniting untamed fires.”)There is ingenuity in the varying parameters for a musical that Cosson feeds into ChatGPT, including conflict, setting and structure (for example, a pie-eating contest at a beachside resort). But by Cosson’s design, A.I. is squarely to blame for the resulting artistic failure. The cast does impressive impromptu work, singing on the fly and reading live text from hand-held tablets. Michael Castillejos and Trey Lyford add lo-fi percussion to Lipton’s electronic keyboard, while Heath Saunders appears to lead the ensemble’s unpolished vocals. But the songs and dialogue, though generated anew each night, are no doubt consistently inane.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Review: In Theresa Rebeck’s ‘Dig’, a Plant Shop Nurtures Weary Souls

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      Theresa Rebeck’s play, a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, is a beautifully acted dramedy exploring the truth and warped perceptions of it.Amid the thriving greenery of an indie plant shop called Dig, two living organisms are only tenuously clinging to survival.One is a neglected wreck of withering vegetation brought in for emergency care. The other is a woman huddled in the corner, her hood up to block out the world. She’s here with her father, Lou, who nearly killed that plant. But as he bickers amusingly with his old friend Roger, the kindly grump who owns the store, she is too bone-weary to engage.Her name is Megan, and one of the worst misfortunes has blanketed her in grief: the death of her little boy in a notorious accident, which the whole country knows was all her fault. Total strangers despise her for it, yet no one is blaming Megan more mercilessly than she is herself. After a suicide attempt, she is living with her father in the Ohio town where she grew up. So far, it isn’t going great.“I embarrass him,” she tells Roger after Lou steps out. Pre-empting any argument to the contrary, she adds: “The truth is the truth and if you try to get around it, it will come after you and take you down.”The truth and poisonously warped perceptions of it are major themes in Theresa Rebeck’s new play “Dig,” at 59E59 Theaters, and we’ll get to that. First let’s pause to run down the list of off-putting subjects mentioned so far: death of a child, grief, suicide.But this intelligent, compassionate, beautifully acted dramedy — directed by the playwright for Primary Stages — is not a downer. Rebeck has spiked her script with comedy, and enlisted a cast as nimble with laugh lines as with prickliness and pain.As Megan, Andrea Syglowski has a coiled, almost feral rage that snaps its tight leash more than once. Just watch her go after Molly (Mary Bacon), a chatty customer who has been trying to figure out why Megan looks so familiar. When the penny drops, Megan turns on her with a scorching intensity.Alongside mourning and self-reproach, repentance is a motif in Megan’s life; she is forever apologizing. But humor can coexist with all that, and in this hope-filled, distinctly non-Pollyanna-ish play, she is very funny, too.Swiftly feeling more comfortable at Dig than in her father’s house — Roger (Jeffrey Bean), an absolute geek for plants, has a nurturing vibe — she finagles her way into an unpaid job there, and flourishes a bit. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader.) Everett (Greg Keller), the stoner who is the shop’s only other employee, sees her as a rival for Roger’s esteem. And Megan nearly worships Roger, which Everett truly does not get.“No offense, but you’re like a larva,” she says. “You know, you’re like something that’s not even a bug yet. So I don’t actually expect you to understand.”One of the judgiest gossips in town, Everett cloaks aggressive cruelty in the guise of honesty. But he has Keller’s charisma and comic chops, so the audience loves him. In an Act II scene between Megan and Everett, he is faced with a choice so morally appalling that a bad decision could change everything we’ve thought about him. I have never felt an audience silently will a character to do the right thing the way it did in that moment.Hypocrisy and sexist double standards are fundamental to what Rebeck is contemplating in “Dig,” as feminist a play as any of her others. She is examining not just parental guilt — Lou (Triney Sandoval) feels this, too, about Megan — but also deeply ingrained notions about the sanctity of motherhood in particular, and the censoriousness that failing at it brings.Everett and the many others eager to condemn Megan think they know the truth about her son’s death. Even Lou holds her responsible, but he ought to listen to himself.“She was always a screw-up,” he tells Roger, “but never in a million years would anyone have believed that she could do something so grotesque.”Did she, though? Megan has taken the blame, heaped it on herself. She believes to her core that she deserves it.She confessed to the police. And no one dug any further: It is the mother’s fault.DigThrough Oct. 22 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘A Eulogy for Roman’ Review: Farewell to a Friend, With Help From the Audience

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      Check your cynicism at the door: Brendan George is earnest and endearing as he mourns Roman in this one-man show.Delivering a eulogy is never easy at the best of times, and it’s an especially tough slog for Milo, whose best friend, Roman, has recently died. The pair had been close since childhood, and Milo, who is in his early 20s, appears especially shaken. It quickly becomes obvious that he will need a supportive hand from those attending the service.And that means us, the audience members at Peter Charney and Brendan George’s “A Eulogy for Roman,” a modest but sneakily affecting show that just opened at 59E59 Theaters.It is not long before we are roped into helping the flustered Milo (played by George, a graduate student at New York University who also wrote the play). He asks a theatergoer to help him sort index cards on which he has scribbled some thoughts about Roman. Then he wonders if anyone can share tips for dealing with loss. “Dogs,” a woman volunteered at the performance I attended.Of course, Milo’s gentle prompts serve to move around the show’s emotional building blocks, but he is such a charming presence that it feels as though he is including the theatergoers in a conversation rather than simply manipulating them to serve his storytelling needs.There is a bit of unease, however, as Milo’s emotion is decidedly self-centered — he doesn’t tell us anything very revealing about Roman. Then again, isn’t part of the grieving process the act of figuring out how one continues to live?To overcome his disarray, Milo decides to complete a project he had embarked on with Roman: getting through a “Life Points List,” a lengthy catalog of experiences “that would remind us that we are alive and make us feel alive.” A few of them still hadn’t been checked off when Roman died, and perhaps, Milo suggests, the memorial-goers might want to help him achieve closure. The remaining tasks include suggesting songs for a playlist (my fellow audience members spontaneously latched onto a candy theme) and teaming up with Milo to do 100 push-ups. As amusing as those scenes are, they can feel like activities at a children’s birthday party, even if the show tends to stay on the right side of that dangerous line.The use of a list as a way to deal with death, combined with audience participation, brings to mind Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit play “Every Brilliant Thing,” though “A Eulogy for Roman” does not weave the more discomforting sides of our existence into its fabric as effectively as that show did.Still, George has an endearing presence and Charney, who is credited with concept and direction, moves the action along at a steady pace. And there is something refreshing about the show’s commitment to earnestness. We have been so conditioned to expect a certain degree of cynicism that I spent a good portion of the evening wondering when we were going to discover that Roman or Milo or both were psychopaths. But no: The bravest thing about “A Eulogy for Roman” is its embrace of kindness, resilience and community.A Eulogy for RomanThrough Sept. 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Invisible’ Review: Brown and British

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      As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Nikhil Parmar’s solo play is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable.In the world of Nikhil Parmar’s funny, fantastical solo play “Invisible,” the mind-set of Britain has undergone a significant shift. One of the West’s favorite boogeymen — the Islamic fundamentalist — has vanished from the public imagination. Chinese terrorists are the designated bad guys now.For brown British actors like Zayan Prakash (Parmar), that is both good news and bad. On the one hand, strangers no longer look at him and assume that he’s a threat. On the other, that means the Muslim terrorist roles that were once so prolific have disappeared. So what’s left for him to play? Just “doctors, cabdrivers and corner shop owners.” He’s lucky if those characters get names.“Invisible,” at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable, before shape-shifting into something close to reality. But first this play, directed by Georgia Green for London’s Bush Theater, is a sharp and lively comedy in which the charismatic Zayan recalls answering his door to find his ex-girlfriend, Ella, the mother of his toddler daughter, standing there.“Hello. Why do you look weird?” Ella asks, and Zayan — who’s looking weird because he’s just heard on the news about the demise of “brown terrorism” — pivots to the audience with a cliché-killing aside that won my heart: “I was going to do her bit in a really high-pitched voice but, (a), it sounded pretty offensive and, (b), she actually has a properly deep voice, so.”Ella has come to tell Zayan that she has a live-in boyfriend, Terrence, an old classmate of theirs from drama school whose career is flourishing; he’s Korean and playing a terrorist in a prestige drama, now that “East Asian fundamentalism” is supposedly a menace. Zayan can’t stand Terrence, but their ensuing rivalry makes for laughs, even as it drives home a point about jostling for position inside a white-supremacist system.The magnetic Parmar slips in and out of Zayan and the crowd of characters around him, each distinct. Though the play’s narrative becomes somewhat tangled and unruly, there is method in its muchness.What torments Zayan is a creeping sense of his own invisibility: Now that he isn’t perceived as a terrorist, he fails to register at all. Yet over the show’s 60-minute running time, we see Zayan for the multitude that he is: underemployed actor, reluctant cater waiter, incompetent weed dealer, doting father, inattentive son. He is also a grieving brother haunted by the ghost of his dead little sister, the person who looked at him and saw someone central to her story.It is disorienting, and infuriating, to be hampered by a culture’s — and an industry’s — blinkered perception of what a whole group of people is capable of. “Invisible” is a thoughtfully provocative, witheringly knowing response to that noxiousness.InvisibleThrough July 2 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour. More