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    ‘The Immortal Jellyfish Girl’ Review: A 26th-Century Love Story

    Featuring a lobster telephone and a robot boy with wings, this puppet romance set in a future post-ecological collapse succeeds on its own weird terms.The first time Bug and Aurelia kiss is as romantic as can be, even if Bug has to get past his initial reaction. “That really hurts,” he says. “That stings so much!” Which is what you get when smooching a part-jellyfish humanoid.Aurelia is the title character of “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” though if 23andMe still exists in her postapocalyptic world, it might locate traces of kangaroo, frog, naked mole rat and other beasties in her makeup. Above all, “she is also 100 percent puppet,” as the narrator, a mischievous masked fox in shorts and red tails, informs us.Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock’s play, devised with help from the ensemble and presented by Wakka Wakka Productions and the Norwegian company Nordland Visual Theater at 59E59 Theaters, is indeed a puppet show, and an ambitious one at that. It’s not just that the story is set in a poetically rendered 2555, but that Waage and Warnock, who also directed, blithely ignored the memo about coddling young audiences: Their show, for viewers age 10 and up, does not shy from the violence and death intertwined with life, and indeed several characters meet a tragic ending.We are on a future Earth that has been wrecked by ecological disaster and where humans have evolved into two groups at war with each other: the machine-enhanced Homo technalis and Homo animalis, who are mixed with animals. If you have any kind of familiarity with stories of star-crossed young lovers, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Bug (voiced by Alexander Burnett at the performance I attended) is part of the first group while Aurelia (voiced by Dorothy James) is an Animalis. And not just any Animalis: She has the ability to generate polyps that grow into various animals, thus providing a ray of hope for a dying planet. The Fox (Waage) explains that “she is the first living DNA bank in the world.” (The title is inspired by the so-called immortal jellyfish, a real species that somehow can age in reverse.)As if ecological devastation weren’t enough, Bug and Aurelia must also deal with the machinations of the disembodied Technalis ruler, Doyenne, a featureless head floating above her lair.Like the earlier Wakka Wakka/Nordland collaboration “Baby Universe: A Puppet Odyssey” (2010), the production revolves around environmental concerns, which it mines with humor, emotion and storytelling verve — the Fox is prone to breaking the fourth wall and making jokes aimed at the adults in the crowd. (“Where are the clones? Send in the clones.”)Admittedly, it’s not always easy to follow, and the action hits some confusing potholes near the end, but “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl” does create an eerie, slightly morbid universe packed with bold strokes: a Lovecraftian squid and a lobster telephone that could have been dreamed up by Salvador Dalí; Bug suddenly sprouting a pair of wings from his back; Aurelia surrounded by odd animal forms floating in individual tanks. The sonic imagination is just as refined, with the composer and sound designer Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson consistently delivering an array of expressive effects — he digitally assembled prerecorded vocals into a composite to create Doyenne’s voice, for example. Even if you can’t figure out what the heck that prophecy is all about or what’s meant to happen to Earth at the end, the show succeeds on its own weird terms.The Immortal Jellyfish GirlThrough Feb. 12 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    When Monsters Make the Best Husbands

    “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences” and “Heaven,” two plays in Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, offer two very different views of marriage.The monster is nestled in a glacier when the villagers dig him out, frozen but not dead, because he was undead already. Tall, broad-shouldered, hulking in his platform boots, he is instantly recognizable, and once he thaws, proves unpretentious despite his Hollywood fame.It is 1946 in a tiny European village, and he is the most endearing of monsters: awkward, uncertain, just wanting to help out. And in “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences,” a winsome cartwheel of a show that’s part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Irish festival, he finds lasting romance — with a local outcast who falls in love with him at first sight. Never mind that by his own account he is “constructed from the dismembered body parts of a number of different corpses”; their sex life is fabulous.Written and directed by Zoë Seaton for her Big Telly Theater Company, from Northern Ireland, this quick-witted frolic is adapted from Owen Booth’s short story of the same name. On the smallest stage at 59E59 Theaters, with a nimble and inventive cast of four, it is a fast-moving comedy that dares to tip into poignancy.The soulful, well-meaning monster (Rhodri Lewis) and his brisk, nameless wife (Nicky Harley) spend years finding a way to fit into their tiny village, whose populace is represented by the much-doubling Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson. With a large wooden cupboard as the movable centerpiece of its no-frills set (by Ryan Dawson Laight, who also designed the costumes), the play is the story of their marriage: passion, heartbreaks and all. Also mishaps — inevitable where a slightly bungling monster is involved.“One day he gets drunk and manages to lose her entire flock of 63 rare Italian blue sheep,” Robinson tells us, in narrator mode. “They spend years arguing about that.”With a dreamy, heightened air abetted by the lighting (by Blue Hanley and Sinead Owens), the play has tender depths. The monster and his wife can’t have children, and this grieves them terribly. But they get on with life, and with loving each other. And in their imaginations, they create together a whole secret world.In “Heaven,” Andrew Bennett plays a married man who fantasizes about a young man who looks like Jesus.Ste MurrayA very different kind of marriage awaits audiences at Eugene O’Brien’s two-hander “Heaven,” also part of Origin’s 1st Irish at 59E59. So does a helpful glossary of terms, stapled to the one-sheet program. “On the todd” means single; “up the duff” means pregnant; a “ride” is having sex; and so on.Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) have been married for 20 years. In their 50s, the parents of a 19-year-old daughter who has never gotten along with Mairead, they haven’t slept together in quite some time. Still, Mal says: “We are the best of pals.”Back in Mairead’s hometown for a wedding, she kisses an ex-boyfriend — one of many she had before settling down with Mal, who lately has taken to indulging sexual fantasies about Jesus that he first had as an altar boy. A young man who looks like Jesus is a guest at the wedding, and now Mal has fantasies about him, too.Directed by Jim Culleton for the Dublin-based company Fishamble, “Heaven” is constructed as a series of alternating monologues by Mairead and Mal, narrating their alcohol- and drug-fueled adventures over the wedding weekend.It’s a well acted, reasonably entertaining play. But while “Heaven” might appear at first to be interested in shaking up the status quo, it turns out to have a drearily conventional spirit, certainly where Mairead is concerned.As the play nears its end, she makes a U-turn away from her own desire, abruptly keen instead on inhabiting one of the most selfless and desexualized of female roles. It’s an out-of-nowhere switcheroo, and it feels utterly imposed.Even so, O’Brien’s final line is perfect — in a shaggy-dog-story way.Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the FencesThrough Jan. 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.HeavenThrough Jan. 29 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Review: In ‘Ye Bear & Ye Cubb,’ Colonial America Takes the Stage

    A play first performed in a tavern in 1665 survives with its title, and the court case it precipitated, intact — but nothing else.The first scripted performance in colonial America took place in a Virginia tavern on Aug. 27, 1665. Not a line of it remains, not a character name, not a whisper of plot. Even its genre — comedy, satire, arboreal drama? — is lost to time. But its title, “Ye Bare and Ye Cubb,” has survived. So has the court case it precipitated. Because as long as there has been theater in America, there has been someone around to hate on it. The actors were promptly arrested, and what we know about the play we know from court records.These dregs of history are the fermenting agent for “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” at 59E59 Theaters. Those responsible for the original were charged with public wickedness. The devisers of this new version, which includes a cream pie and several fart jokes, don’t really know how to behave, either. Created by No. 11 Productions and directed by Ryan Emmons, “Ye Bear” is a fantasia on colonial themes — messy, overstated, indifferently competent. It is also tenacious and generous, with a sweet-tempered approach to its audience interactions.After an unnecessary dream sequence (so much in the script, credited to six company members, is unnecessary), the action begins in Fowkes’ Tavern. William Darby (Steven Conroy, who also plays a version of himself) has written a play, and he recruits two friends, Cornelius Watkinson (Anthony Michael Martinez) and Philip Howard (Erin Lamar), and an unknown person in a bear costume (or possibly an actual bear, it’s unclear) to perform it there. After the players are arrested, they are asked to perform it again, in full costume, before the court.So far, this matches the historical record. But while the court reports are silent on the contents of the play, No. 11 voices an imagined version, with lines like: “The goose is loose/by the beard of Zeus/the fawn is gone/are we amidst a con?” (The play’s name references Ben Jonson’s masques, a dubious inspiration.) These sequences are, at best, embarrassing, as is the alliteration-heavy courtroom drama that ensues. Clearly, this verbiage is bad on purpose — which doesn’t make it any easier to endure. Every character stops the show for a monologue. Few of them should. If the script reveals a decent knowledge of theater history, it never offers immersion in what life might have been like in early America, what excitement these players might have felt or the risks they took — knowingly or otherwise — in giving this performance.The script’s insufficiencies are softened by the company’s attitude — warm and inclusive — toward the audience. From the first, the spectators are invited in (considering the cramped layout of the upstairs theater, there are few alternatives) and encouraged to buy drinks at the onstage bar. Later, they are recruited as seamstresses, as witnesses, as a bailiff and a miscreant. Theater, the play suggests, is a communal effort. No. 11 puts that into action, with free beers for the spectators charged with sewing a doublet.We know so little about theater in America’s first century. The earliest report of professional actors here is of a troupe that had been kicked out of England for violating a licensing act in the 1750s, nearly 150 years after the first colonists settled. If theater happened previously — and it did, in some form, in schools and churches and the occasional tavern or purpose-built playhouse — it meant that small groups of people, all of whom had other jobs and priorities, met in small rooms and made something together.This is what “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” seeks, in its shambling way, to honor. “Let’s raise a glass,” Conroy, as himself, says late in the play, “to the artists and the work that we don’t know and the names that never got written down.” Would those 17th-century artists enjoy what No. 11 has wrought? That, too, is unknown. But let’s hope they wouldn’t sue.Ye Bear & Ye CubbThrough Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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    ‘Off Peak’ Review: Caught in Limbo on the Northbound Track

    Two passengers share more than just an eerie commute aboard a train headed upstate.The set of the new play “Off Peak” could have earned its own section in the Umberto Eco essay “Travels in Hyperreality” — doubly so since it is a hyperreal representation of travel. We are in a meticulous facsimile of a Metro-North car, three rows from the door. New Yorkers will be familiar with those blue and maroon vinyl seats, with that floor, encrusted with the grime of a million commutes. A newspaper and a paper coffee cup have been left behind, for good measure.This is so close to life that you expect a conductor to come in at any second. But that never happens, because despite intercom announcements letting us know that the train is the local to Poughkeepsie, Brenda Withers’s play feels as if it’s taking place in an almost ghostly limbo at odds with Sasha Schwartz’s lifelike replica of a set: “They don’t take our tickets, they don’t check on us, no one comes through,” a passenger named Sarita (Nance Williamson) says.She’s talking to Martin (Kurt Rhoads), the only other person in the play and, apparently, on the train — except for the unseen conductor (voiced by Doug Ballard), who gives intermittent updates on station arrivals. Soon enough, he informs Martin and Sarita that the train has to make an emergency stop.The pair, who are in their mid-50s, haven’t seen each other in almost 20 years and are catching up, a little awkwardly at first. After a few minutes of chit-chat, it’s obvious that they used to be a bit closer than mere acquaintances. The conversation continues — for longer than either would have expected, thanks to the delay — and whoa, Martin and Sarita are a lot more than near-strangers on a train.She is the livelier character, and there is a lovely quickness to Williamson’s performance, with a soupçon of neurosis and a touch of defensiveness (maybe that’s why Sarita tends to prattle a bit). Rhoads does whatever he can with a more stolid role. He and Williamson must be accustomed to spending time together in tight quarters: They have been married for almost four decades and regularly act together — they played the title characters in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” this summer. Jess Chayes’s production of “Off Peak,” currently at 59E59 Theaters, originated nearby, at the Westchester County home of the presenting Hudson Stage Company.If Martin appears to play offense, it’s because he has a past, and an agenda. After he whips out an envelope filled with $4,000, it takes Sarita way too long to realize that it was not chance that placed them in the same car of the same train at the same time. He cornered her — there is no other word for what he’s doing — because he wants to make amends. He has grown up since they were together, he tells Sarita (whose behavior when she first saw him now makes more sense), and he even starts bandying about words like “patriarchy” and “sexism.”To Withers’s credit, “Off Peak” does not veer into account-settling, because Sarita refuses to play Martin’s game. She is not swayed by his new allyship and its accompanying self-flagellation, does not want to be stuck in the role of victim he is trying to assign her. What Withers is less comfortable doing is making a good case for why Sarita sticks around and endures Martin when she could just move to another seat in another painstakingly detailed car.Off PeakThrough Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    How Female Playwrights Are Adapting, and Revamping, ‘Macbeth’

    With “Macbeth” adaptations like “Peerless,” the inner lives of young women come into focus.When the playwright Jiehae Park was in high school, applying for college was a competitive sport. One of her friends, she recounted recently, applied to every Ivy League college and only got into one: the University of Pennsylvania. Instead of feeling joy, her friend started weeping, bemoaning what she considered to be the inferior Ivy. “Which is a bananas thing to say,” Park noted.For her part, Park went to Amherst, not an Ivy League school. But that high school experience stayed with her, becoming the inspiration for “Peerless,” a “Macbeth” adaptation about twin sisters who are so determined to get into an elite college that they resort to murder. This Primary Stages production, onstage at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday, follows the major plot points of “Macbeth,” but the setting and story couldn’t be more different: the cutthroat environment of college admissions among the students at a Midwestern high school.Each year brings new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, but a few recent works, inspired by “Macbeth,” have stood out because they were written by female playwrights who refocused the story on the inner lives of young women. In addition to “Peerless,” there are Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” about a group of college students who backstab one another in order to get the lead role in a school play, and “Mac Beth,” by Erica Schmidt, who condensed the text to 90 minutes and set her work in an all-girls high school.In “Peerless,” ruthless competition and the toxicity of the model minority myth are among the issues addressed. The twins, who are Asian American, decide to kill the competition: the Native American and Black students they believe unfairly got their spots. This scenario speaks to the objections to affirmative action, making the play especially timely as the Supreme Court considers race-based college admissions. Alexis Soloski called it a “sly and polished adaptation” in her review for The Times.The sisters “are the logical result of the system,” Park said. “It’s so effective at setting up ways in which groups that have less power, but perhaps more power than another group that has even less power, will stand against those less powerful groups. But the people with the most power? They’re just chilling.”From left, Caroline Orlando, Morgan Lui, Natasja Naarendorp, Laura Clare Browne and Marie Dinolan in “Macbitches,” Sophie McIntosh’s riff on “Macbeth” that ran at the Chain Theater this summer.Wesley VolcyThe actor Sasha Diamond said starring in “Peerless” — and previously in “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s adaptation of “Richard III” — has helped her to feel included in a part of the literary canon that she’s always felt excluded from. “The way that we are educated as Americans is with a Western European literary history,” said Diamond, who is Chinese and white. “The texts that we draw from and the things that we learn are not about us. And so when these playwrights adapt the stories that have been taught to us as ‘the canon,’” she said, and then make them specific to “our cultures or the world that we live in, it is a reclaiming. And it is empowering.”Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations.On Stage: Earlier this year, Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga starred in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production felt oddly uneasy, our critic wrote.Lady Macbeth: In Gold’s revival, Negga, who was nominated for a Tony Award, infused the character, and her marriage to Macbeth, with intensity, urgency and vitality.Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s crackling adaptation of the Scottish Play, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embodied a toxic power couple with mastery.Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?Schmidt said the mixture of magic and murders most foul led her to write “Mac Beth,” which Red Bull Theater produced. “Macbeth,” she said, is “so satisfying, and it has so much dark comedy in it that people keep coming back to it.” (In her Times review, Laura Collins-Hughes remarked on the “unusual immediacy” of a production that made the characters “we know from ‘Macbeth’ legible in new ways.”)The playwrights all agreed that a woman’s perspective is a natural fit for Shakespeare’s play about power and corruption. After all, Lady Macbeth is arguably the more ruthless of the pair: she encourages Macbeth to murder the king. “Lady Macbeth is the most interesting person. She’s the best part of the play,” said Park, whose “Peerless” has been produced around the country since its 2015 premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.For McIntosh, whose “Macbitches” was presented at the Chain Theater in August, these retellings consider what ambition can look like in women. “Male ambition is almost universally respected to a certain extent,” McIntosh said. “With female ambition, there’s almost an expectation of pettiness to it. And the expectation of, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into. She’s being needy. She’s being catty. She’s being selfish.’”These adaptations also embrace the violence of the source material. Macbeth kills the king, then his rivals, and a child. Eventually, Macbeth is also killed and Lady Macbeth commits suicide. Schmidt wanted to examine young people’s susceptibility to violence, and drew inspiration from school shootings and the so-called Slender Man stabbing in 2014 (the case in which two 12-year-old girls stabbed a classmate multiple times after luring her to a park). In “Mac Beth,” a group of teenage girls meet in a field to do their own version of “Macbeth.” What begins as playacting becomes more gruesome, with the girls eventually killing a schoolmate.“I feel that we all have this capacity within us for killing people, that this is part of our nature as humans,” said Schmidt, whose play has also been performed around the country. “And I think that it’s really difficult for people to accept that or to believe that or to see that in themselves. And so when you have all these school shootings, or you have young women behaving in this extremely violent way, suddenly it forces you to think about what’s happening in a different way.”Lily Santiago in Erica Schmidt’s “Mac Beth,” which had an acclaimed run at Red Bull Theater in 2019.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWith “Macbitches,” McIntosh, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, wanted to deliver contemporary social commentary, citing the toxic power dynamics she said she witnessed between students and faculty members at the college. As she met other young artists after graduating, she said, “I was really surprised to hear that so many of their experiences paralleled ours so closely.”In her riff on “Macbeth,” McIntosh dispenses with plot points, instead evoking similar themes — abuse of power and the price of ambition. A group of young women audition for a college production of “Macbeth,” but when the freshman gets the coveted role of Lady Macbeth, the others become jealous. As the play escalates toward violence, it is clear that something is rotten in the state of the drama program, with abuses of power on the part of the faculty.It’s “Macbeth” by way of #MeToo. And Juan A. Ramírez, in his Times review, commended it for juggling “headier themes while remaining a lively college drama.” McIntosh, who served as dramaturge for a college production of “Macbeth,” said she wanted to highlight how ambition in the entertainment industry can be used to excuse all kinds of misbehavior. She also wanted to call out the sentiment that “art has to be suffering,” she said. “If you defy that, it means that you’re not a good actor, you don’t have what it takes, you’re not committed to the craft.”These reimagined productions of Shakespeare haven’t come without criticism, though. During a production of “Mac Beth” in Seattle, Schmidt recalls audience members laughing at the actresses playing male characters. “Another source of criticism was like, ‘Why isn’t there something explaining to us why they’re doing the play?’” Schmidt said, which to her feels like a “devaluing of the teenage voice, or the young woman.”Park said some audience members have issues with her protagonists being young Asian American women, and of her portrayal of Asian Americans who are unapologetically villainous. “It’s so tied up in the model minority expectation, of who’s allowed to be anything other than perfect,” she said. “It’s a legit question of, are we at the point culturally where there’s space for more complex representations? I hope so.” More

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    ‘The Unbelieving’ Review: Life After Faith

    In a probing new play from the Civilians, based on interviews from the book “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” current and former members of the clergy grapple with the reality of losing their religion.For Adam, not his real name, change started with curiosity and critical thinking. A Church of Christ minister and a creationist, he came to realize that his worldview was sheltered, so he set out to educate himself.“In nine months, I read over 60 books, listened to hundreds of hours of lectures and debates, watched 25 documentaries and movies,” he says. “Went through eight online courses on philosophy, evolution.”It didn’t occur to him that what he found would shake his faith. He thought, he tells a researcher, that God “can handle any questions I’ve got.”“Well, he didn’t measure up!” says Adam (David Aaron Baker), his voice rising with emotion that’s more wounded than angry. His belief in God has left him, and that threatens his job, his family, his friendships — every corner of his life. So when he speaks to the researcher, he insists on the protection of a pseudonym. He cannot afford for word to get out.“The Unbelieving,” a probing, interview-based new play from the Civilians, is about people like Adam: current and former members of the clergy who have lost their religion, even if they still publicly practice it.Written by Marin Gazzaniga and based on interviews conducted for Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola’s 2013 book, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” this smart and slender play listens to its characters without judgment. Not trying to hit its audience over the head with lessons, it is conducive to empathy.Like Linda (Nina Hellman), the researcher, Steve Cosson’s production at 59E59 Theaters is quiet, inquisitive and welcoming. Designed by Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh, the setting for Linda’s interviews is as anonymous as can be: a hotel meeting room with beige walls and vertical blinds, drawn. (The lighting, by Lucrecia Briceño, heightens the atmosphere.)Linda interviews, among others, a Mormon bishop (Dan Domingues), an Orthodox rabbi (Richard Topol), a former Roman Catholic nun (Sonnie Brown) and a former imam (Joshua David Robinson), who allows himself a little smile when he boasts that he won “trophies at Quranic reading competitions” growing up.These are contemplative people, and they were sincere in their devotion once. Now each describes what is, to varying degrees, a crisis. Not a crisis of faith; they’re beyond that. Rather, it’s a crisis about faith: how to go on without it — practically, emotionally, socially.In documenting that dilemma, “The Unbelieving” becomes not only an examination of the power of religion in American culture. It’s also an even-keeled meditation on the link between conformity and community — the enormous fear of being cast out and the frantic desire to continue belonging, even if that means living dishonestly.Take Johnny (Jeff Biehl), an Apostolic Pentecostal pastor who works for his closest friend as a building inspector. His friend, Johnny says, is “a flaming Charismatic Pentecostal,” so Johnny has not confided in him about his own loss of faith.“Everyone knows me as a minister,” Johnny says. “So everybody who sees that he has hired me, they’re like, ‘You have got a jewel. This is a man of God.’ If all of a sudden I become the atheist, as far as they know, I’m going to forge reports and lie about inspections, and cheat people out of money.”To leave his church would be to risk his livelihood, his relationships, his reputation. Then there’s what the shift in his beliefs has already taken from him: the comforting prospect of spending the afterlife with people he loves.“It means,” he says, “that this pact that my grandmother and I made 20 years ago doesn’t mean anything: that we would do everything we could to both be in heaven together.”There’s a lot of anguish in “The Unbelieving.” As it turns out, there’s a lot of courage, too.The UnbelievingThrough Nov. 19 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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    Review: Star-Crossed Lovers in Need of a Divine Assist

    Andrew Rincón’s play about reigniting passions in the heavens and the bedroom is a jumble of genres at 59E59 Theaters.Tired of digesting all the world’s heartbreak, Cupid calls it quits in Andrew Rincón’s “I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet.” The play, a New Light Theater Project production having its premiere at 59E59 Theaters, is experiencing a similar existential crisis. Despite appealing performances, smooth direction by Jesse Jou, and some touching moments, this cosmic look at the pains of love aims wobbly arrows at too many marks.Seeing his friend Cupid (Jacqueline Guillén), the goddess of love, so distraught, Saint Valentine (Greg Cuellar) tries to remind her of affection’s earthly charms by taking her to Hackensack, N.J., where a young couple in the middle of a breakup might provide the challenge she needs to get back in the spirit.That couple, Alejandro (a sturdy Juan Arturo) and Benny (Ashton Muñiz, a soothing presence with comedic chops), have decided to separate after six years together, but Valentine thinks the relationship is worth saving. Cupid and Valentine each pick one to take on a journey of self-discovery, with the goal of guiding them back to each other. These pilgrimages, however, lead to hastily mentioned histories of internalized shame and sexual abuse that overburden the play’s final 20 minutes.Rincón dabbles in the poetic, mixing the mortals’ sometimes self-help-sounding domestic discourse with grandiose statements of love everlasting from the divine duo, who are prone to endless arguments. (That said, it is Alejandro who speaks the childish title phrase, a romanticization of Shakespeare’s text not meant to read as satire.) The clash highlights the play’s confusion as to whether it wants to be a comedy about meddling powers, or a drama about a couple whose breakup undergoes divine intervention. Brittany Vasta’s two-level set, nicely split between the heavens and the bedroom, makes a stronger case for this duality.The same can’t be said for the script, which is untidy in its overuse of Spanglish. Aside from a great joke when a character is shocked to discover the love goddess is a Latina (“Did you really think Cupid could be anything but?”), the Spanish in the text, liberally sprinkled throughout, lacks cohesion because its significance hasn’t been established. When it is used to convey meaningful points, I wondered if non-speakers would be able to follow along, or what Hispanic viewers were supposed to gain. It’s maddening when another tongue is used as a crutch, a substitute for personality that winds up exoticizing the language it sets out to exalt, or “normalize.” If a sentiment lacks power when expressed without a show of bilingualism, it does not gain it through translation.At times it seems as if the play could have revolved around Betti (Elizabeth Ramos), a romantically inexperienced dental hygienist Benny befriends and starts dating, somewhat platonically. Ramos’s smallness during her first scene gives way to an explosive physical performance as Betti comes into her own and experiences first love (with Cupid, no less). Through sheer allure, the actress turns a character largely superfluous to the already jumbled story into the production’s most valuable, displaying the irresistibility of earnest hope in a work that too often dips into its bathos.I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and JulietThrough Nov. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    In This Playwright’s Dystopia, Forgetting Is Forbidden

    Steven Fechter’s “The Memory Exam” begins with a promising setup, our critic writes, while Grant MacDermott’s marriage story “Jasper” struggles for emotional resonance.Far from any humans who might report suspicious activity, or surveillance cameras that would record it, a tetchy little foursome emerges into a clearing deep in the woods. What they’re doing is forbidden, and if they are caught, they could be killed.In Steven Fechter’s dystopian thriller “The Memory Exam,” at 59E59 Theaters, the authorities keep tabs on older people’s recollection, abetted by neighbors who snitch on neighbors for lapses as innocuous as walking out of a store and forgetting a purchase. Slip up one too many times and you get called in for a brutally simple test: Remember the five objects they show you and you live. Miss even one and you die.The three septuagenarians who have followed Dale (Vernice Miller), a psychotherapist, into the woods for this clandestine cram session hope desperately that she can help them strategize their way through the exam, which is coming right up. Tom (Gus Kaikkonen), a retired professor who lives alone and doesn’t notice when he repeats himself, has no idea who ratted him out. Neither do Hank (Alfred Gingold), a retired minister whose recall is the most obviously degraded of this bunch, or his wife, Jen (Bekka Lindström), once a much beloved mayor, who recently became disoriented walking through her own neighborhood.“Why isn’t the town protecting you?” Dale asks.“People forget,” Hank says.That is the crux of this play, which Fechter explains in a program note was inspired by the deaths of so many older people early in the pandemic, and spurred on “when some politicians suggested that seniors should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the economy.” Directed by Terrence O’Brien for Oberon Theater Ensemble, it’s a show about the value of life, and of memory.Though the setup is promising, the execution is clunky. When the characters start reciting quotations about memory, we sense the playwright’s voice instead of theirs. Likewise when Jen utters a line that sounds straight out of a male sexual fantasy as she recounts what was clearly a traumatic sexual assault.And while we might be able to suspend disbelief about Dale’s peculiar mnemonic method — she asks each of the others to resurrect a strong memory and tell the group a corrupted version of it, incorporating the five objects they’re trying to remember — the idea that Hank could wrap his clouded mind around granular detail, as he does in his monologue, is a stretch.Fechter does build in surprises, though, and suspense. If the play’s convoluted final scene goes on a bit too long, and is not wholly credible, at least you don’t see its resolution coming.That, unfortunately, cannot be said about Grant MacDermott’s schematic “Jasper,” at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Directed by Katie McHugh for Yonder Window Theater Company, the play opens on a quarrelsome, mercurial marriage strained by years of caring for an incapacitated child, whose perilous health is a nonstop emergency.Andrea (Jessica Pimentel) is the tenacious stay-at-home mom to the offstage Jasper, pursuing every slender thread of hope that he might be healed. For her and her husband, Drew (Dominic Fumusa), who works in construction, normal things like having friends — or having sex — are bygone luxuries. Loving their child, they live in a constant state of red alert. (Sound design, by John Gromada, evokes this potently.)Jessica Pimentel as Andrea and Dominic Fumusa as her husband, Drew, wrestle with parenthood and coupledom in “Jasper,” at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Russ RowlandBut while Andrea’s world has shrunk to encompass only home and hospitals, Drew still gets out and about. One day on the subway, he makes funny faces at a toddler in a stroller and falls into conversation with the child’s mother, Shayla (Abigail Hawk), who is beautiful, divorced and tastefully upscale.She’s not a hallucination, but she does seem like someone’s pipe dream. After she jokes that she’s “a high-end escort,” she and Drew banter flirtatiously about her being a “hooker” and “a whore.” That interaction is of a piece with the entire relationship that will blossom between them, in which she is ludicrously complimentary toward him about, oh, everything.Drew seeds it all with a lie, though. He’s honest about being married, but when Shayla asks if he has kids, he says no. In spending time with her and becoming a pal to her Tyler — who, like Jasper, is never seen by the audience — he acts out his wish to have a child who is verbal and ambulatory and expressive and well.Amid all of Drew’s tormented, longing domesticity with Andrea and his furtive quasi domesticity with Shayla (whose presence in Drew’s life Andrea eventually clocks), there is much mention of Tide laundry detergent. Why all the talk of detergent, and why this brand? No idea. In the script, Tide comes up 10 times.But that is just about the only mystery in “Jasper.” On a set by Michael Gianfrancesco in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater, the play wants to plumb the dark, lonely recesses of parenthood and coupledom, but even its most fraught moments struggle for emotional resonance. The ending, when it comes, is visible from miles away.The Memory ExamThrough Sept. 25 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.JasperThrough Oct. 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; yonderwindow.co. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More