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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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      Best Theater of 2024

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      Broadway roared back, but the kitties were downtown and the prayer service was in Brooklyn.Broadway always looks its healthiest around the holidays, and indeed, right now, most of its 41 theaters are lit, with the rest soon set to load in new tenants. Box office grosses, if not quite back to prepandemic levels, seem likely to meet or exceed last year’s $1.6 billion. But the real health of the commercial theater, for me, is demonstrated by how much it offers its audiences, not its investors. That’s why, most years, my list of best shows is top-heavy with the provocative work being brewed Off Broadway. If my latest list tilts the other way, perhaps that reflects Broadway’s liberal borrowings from the noncommercial sector — borrowings and often improvements. My Top 10, listed chronologically and covering the period from December 2023 through the end of November, are therefore mostly shows that, wherever they started and wherever they wind up, put a premium on provocation, sure, but also entertainment. That’s what I call healthy.‘Appropriate’ by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsSarah Paulson, center, in her Tony Award-winning performance in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost plays about racism dramatize the damage done to its victims. But “Appropriate,” which opened last December in a Second Stage Theater production, looks instead at the sickening effects that hatred can have on its perpetrators — and their heirs. On the surface a “dividing the estate” play, with the children of a good ol’ boy squabbling over their inherited real and unreal estate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s uproarious tale of family guilt (directed by Lila Neugebauer and with a blistering, Tony-winning performance by Sarah Paulson) was in effect a corroded mirror reflecting America’s worst (and worst-kept) secrets. (Read our review of “Appropriate” and our profile of Paulson.)‘Terce: A Practical Breviary’ by Heather ChristianThe new year brought with it a new prayer, if you were willing to go to a former Sunday school in Brooklyn to find it. At the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, a large cast of “caregivers and makers” offered an unusual liturgy, performing Heather Christian’s ritual of praise for “the divine feminine.” The visionary composer’s typically catholic musical references — plainsong, gospel, electronica, soul and New Orleans funk — short-circuited rational analysis, inviting transcendence in much the way the rituals of the established church do. But this time, in Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s richly welcoming staging, the transcendence was for everyone, of any faith or none. (Read our review of “Terce.”)‘Dead Outlaw’ by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar MosesAndrew Durand, in the coffin, as the title character in the Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe afterlife of a mummy sounds more like an “I dare you” literary project than a hook for a good-time musical. But the mostly true story of Elmer McCurdy — wastrel, roustabout, schnook and sideshow attraction — got a brilliant coda in this Off Broadway show at the Minetta Lane Theater. The lovingly serious direction by David Cromer tempered the absurdity of the tale with sweetness and humor, and the cast, let by Andrew Durand as McCurdy, responded to the tumbleweed of a score with gorgeous singing. It’s the kind of musical you’d never find on Broadway — except that you might, next year. (Read our review of “Dead Outlaw” and the story behind the show.)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: A Reverse Angle on Arthur Miller in ‘A Woman Among Women’

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      Julia May Jonas’s compelling play, opening the Bushwick Starr’s new theater, explores how a story written about men looks from the other side.Ian McKellen sure knows how to baptize a stage. In 2007, at the recently opened Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, adhering to what he described as his tradition, he capped an evening of public conversation by kneeling to kiss the spotless new boards. Then he rose and recited a speech attributed to Shakespeare.The birth of a theater is always a miracle and a joy, never more so than when the herd is thinning. But the harder work comes after the kiss. Whose words will be spoken there? How smartly, usefully will the space be filled?The Bushwick Starr, a home since 2001 to original and often out-there work, can celebrate on both counts: It has given birth to an adorable new theater and opened it with a healthy new play.The theater, after 23 years in a dim, janky, jury-rigged space on the second floor of a former doll factory, where God forbid you had a bum knee or claustrophobia, has moved three stops farther into Brooklyn on the L train to a former dairy on Eldert Street. The place is still not fancy, but it is bright and welcoming without having sacrificed the invitation of wildness. It honors and improves on the company’s institutional past and the building’s industrial one.And though “A Woman Among Women,” by Julia May Jonas, which opened there Friday in a co-production with New Georges, is likewise a response to an older work, it is nevertheless that rare thing onstage: a fresh story freshly told.The work it responds to, but only generally, without overdrawn parallels, is Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” In that 1947 drama, a pillar-of-the-community type — “a man among men,” as Miller describes him — knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 21 pilots. The collateral damage as the blame is shifted to a business partner drives the plot; the conflict between personal and communal responsibility is the theme.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 ‘Self Portraits (Deluxe),’ a Provocateur Instigates Reflection

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      Through self-examinations and social recriminations, Phillip Howze’s new show explores the injustices facing Black men.The playwright and performer Phillip Howze begins “Self Portraits (Deluxe),” now running at Jack in Brooklyn, by quietly asking for introductions. As he holds up a microphone to spectators (masks are required), Howze’s genial facial expressions mirror each person’s tone of voice. It’s a deceptively empathetic prologue to a fractious and abstracted 80-minute show.In sputtering, stream-of-consciousness-style prose, the artist delves into bouts of self-reflection and social recrimination. Howze muses that he’s never heard of a Black man dying on the toilet, confesses that he has a very small penis, and wonders whether there’s a condom for life experience. (A flushing sound punctuates each discursive riff.)“Make yourself comfortable,” he tells the audience, seated at various angles in the center of a low-ceilinged room the size of a convenience store. “The only way out is through.”The statement portends a sense of captivity that escalates, in ways that are both pointedly intentional and likely inadvertent, throughout this Bushwick Starr production, presented in association with Jack and directed by Dominique Rider. Strobe-like effects (by Masha Tsimring) and soundscapes that evoke an abandoned city on the moon (by Kathryn Ruvuna) lend tension, and an occasional air of drama, to the ensuing collage of performance art interludes. Howze’s preoccupations with shame and death create a tenuous through line.In the next scene, Howze is splayed out on a mattress beneath a suspended fun house mirror, skis dangling from the ceiling as he rehearses his final thoughts. It’s a nod to the death of the actress Natasha Richardson, who suffered fatal head injuries in a skiing accident in 2009. There are less distasteful ways of implicating an audience (mostly white, on the night I attended) in the injustice that attends the degradation of Black men than by suggesting that dying on the slopes is a relatively luxurious, and distinctly white, way to go.As a provocateur, Howze is neither subtle nor as sensitive as his outward demeanor suggests. In a sequence that would mortify anyone averse to audience participation, he gently beseeches a handful of patrons to stand with their hands up and foreheads against the wall, like a row of perpetrators. (“Would you mind? For me?”) Rather than a daring coup, it feels like a breach of good faith — for anyone to refuse would result in a different kind of humiliation.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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      ‘Snatch Adams’ Review: Gross-Out Humor for Not-So-Easily-Shocked Liberals

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      Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s amorphous variety show aims to be a queer spectacle but is mostly improv strung together with non sequiturs.The usually unassuming Soho Rep entrance is now flanked by giant labia glinting with gold-and-fuchsia sequins. Beyond them, a flamingo-pink-hued tunnel leads to the intimate stage, where a colossal pair of brassy legs are splayed as if for a gynecological exam in an amusement park fun house.Much of what occurs between them during “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month,” an amorphous, slap-and-tickle variety show, seems designed to shock audiences while gingerly reinforcing their presumed liberal politics. Once it quickly achieves both, “Snatch Adams” continues to push its crotch-in-your-face humor further over the top, but to diminishing returns.The action onstage tests the limits of what can be described in print. So here is my attempt at a tame sampling.The creator and performer Becca Blackwell (“Is This a Room?”), dressed for the role of Snatch in a towering vagina costume with patches of flesh-colored felt and feathers, asks an audience volunteer to locate the clitoris, represented on Blackwell’s face by a squeaky red clown nose (the crafty and audacious production design is by Greg Corbino). Amanda Duarte, who co-stars as Tainty, wears a puckered-anus headpiece and balloon-size testicles that swing from her shoulders. The getup’s missing member, she explains, was a casualty of #MeToo.Looking like doctor’s office diagrams come to life to a patient on LSD, the performers retreat behind a pair of pink desks, mics in hand, and proceed to banter. Duarte, who also controls the sound effects (think air horns and crickets), appears to follow a run of show on a laptop. But after the initial sight gags and a steady flow of low-hanging puns, “Snatch Adams,” presented in association with the Bushwick Starr, consists mostly of improv strung together with non sequiturs.Duarte, the creator of a recurring comedy night for discarded jokes, plays a gruff and gleefully vulgar captain to Blackwell’s gentle and almost childlike jester, who at times seems adrift. (“What do we do now?” Blackwell repeats sincerely between several bits. In an underdeveloped narrative frame, Snatch is newly unemployed from Planned Parenthood.) They are joined at intervals by Amando Houser and Becky Hermenze, who gamely act out parody commercials, or “capitalism breaks,” for products like poppers and period cups.At intervals in the production, parody commercials for products like poppers and period cups are gamely acted out.Julieta CervantesDirected by Jess Barbagallo, who also developed the show with Corbino, “Snatch Adams” has the freewheeling style of late-night sketch comedy and the queer, campy aesthetic of downtown avant-garde theater, where Blackwell has for years worked to expand understanding of gender diversity. But this is not a show that bristles with punk resistance, alongside its well-justified warning about the use of bodily secretions. For much of their 90 minutes onstage, Blackwell and Duarte simply seem to be riffing off each other while daring the audience to be grossed out. But destigmatizing genitals and menstruation is a low bar, especially for this crowd.Attempts to address fraught issues head-on are uneasy and fall flat. In one early segment, Blackwell reads sobering headlines about the daily challenges facing women and L.G.B.T.Q. people on a local level. Duarte punctuates each one with a fart sound. (Cue the crickets.)At each performance, interviews with a surprise guest promise to be a wild card. Bridget Everett’s entrance on the night I attended was like a blast of pure oxygen: finally a comedian who wasn’t overcommitted to a bit. Everett talked frankly about grief and her body in a way that cut deeper than anything that had come before.It’s when Blackwell steps out of the act at the end, and tries to point out the arbitrary boundaries that society erects between us, that “Snatch Adams” finally seems to have something to say. If only it had been more explicit earlier.Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the MonthThrough Dec. 3 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: about 1 hour 30 minutes, depending on the special guest. More

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      ‘Demons’ Review: Grief Is the Thing with Red Fur

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      A family processes its bereavement in the midst of a demonic haunting in Keelay Gipson’s new play for Bushwick Starr.When Danily, a red-furred, purple-lipped beast, appears onstage, his giant eyelids fluttering and huge maw flapping, he is irresistibly adorable, like something from Jim Henson’s dreams.And did I mention he’s a demon?In “Demons,” presented by Bushwick Starr at the Connelly Theater, a family grieving the recent death of its complicated patriarch becomes the target of a haunting by a puppet ghoul, the unexpected star of an otherwise disorderly production.The story begins when a family gathers for a funeral. The loud, combative Sissy (Paige Gilbert) and her brother, the reserved Bubba (Donell James Foreman), are home, their respective partners in tow, to tend to their God-fearing mother (Gayle Samuels) and to mourn their late father. Mama and Sissy are always fighting, and Bubba is forced to swallow his mother’s homophobia, even in front of his partner (Ashton Muñiz). To top it off, Bubba must also contend with the death of a father who never recognized his son’s queer identity.The play, written by Keelay Gipson, who also directs, is divided into five parts, based on the stages of grief. Each section consists of three scenes, showing the relatives chatting, watching TV, playing spades, all while struggling to communicate their real feelings to one another. When the family’s unspoken secrets come out into the open, our demon appears to exacerbate the conflicts, watching with a pair of glowing eyes in the dark, or pulling poltergeist-like shenanigans during a late-night TV session.You could say Danily is more human than the human characters around him (the fantastic puppet design is by Cedwan Hooks, and Jon Riddleberger directs the puppetry). Because otherwise, Gipson’s two-dimensional direction leaves the cast’s performances transparent. Mama, as the stern but loving matriarch, is a stock character, and Sissy is written unsympathetically and almost exclusively speaks in the tenor of a whine. Sissy and Bubba’s partners aren’t even named.Minjoo Kim’s lighting design, however, is impressive, from the angular splash of light strewn over white roses in a vase to the hazy spotlight over a character’s face replicating the glow of a TV set.But other production elements muddle rather than clarify the storytelling. The set design, by Yu Shibagaki, with its black-and-white floral couches and slate-gray textured walls, works for a funeral parlor, but it can’t pull off doubling as Mama’s home. And the television switches between channels depicting “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Labyrinth,” a trailer for the 2001 movie “Kingdom Come” and then later a “Real Housewives” special, seeming to intentionally nod to several different decades and making the setting unclear.By the end, at least one character has faced his demons, literal and figurative. As for the play, much still bedevils it.DemonsThrough June 3 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      A Welcome Gust of Weird, and Adventures in Shadow Puppetry

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      “My Onliness” is voluptuous and frenetic, while “This and That” is a slip of a show. Both are pleasingly peculiar.Some theaters dim the lights momentarily to signal that the performance is about to begin. Others sound a delicate three-note chime.At the New Ohio Theater, in Greenwich Village, audience members crowded into the lobby waiting to see the madcap new play “My Onliness” are alerted to curtain time by the sudden blast of a conch shell and the arrival of a human with a unicorn head, who leads a procession into the house.Don’t mind the man in swim goggles showering onstage under a thin stream of water, wearing a sign that says “WRITER” and a tall foil hat that looks like the progeny of a Hershey’s Kiss and a bishop’s miter. Just take in the voluptuous strangeness of it all. For theater lovers ravenous for the downtown-peculiar, “My Onliness” is savory sustenance.The cast of characters includes a ginormous lobster, who is warm of heart and terribly charming. But first in this dark, frenetic fable by Robert Lyons, with music by Kamala Sankaram, there is the Mad King.Dressed in sequined red, his face sparkly with glitter, the Mad King (Daniel Irizarry, who directed the show) occupies a throne that is quite literally a high chair — the perfect perch for a childish narcissist extraordinaire, who considers himself “a great genius of living.”“Listen up!” he barks at the audience arrayed around him on three sides. “I told you that in my presence you are all equal. It’s true! You are equally nothing.”A danger to the Writer (Rhys Tivey), whom he considers a threat, and an enemy to Morbidita (Cynthia LaCruz), a subject who dares to approach him with a petition, the Mad King nonetheless has a sneaky charisma, and he’s well-mannered when it suits him.If he wants to lie across spectators’ laps, or recruit someone to drag him around the stage, he asks nicely and does take no for an answer. Ditto when he goes seat to seat, offering generous slugs of rum to each of us. Who says consent protocols can’t be fun?Presented with One-Eighth Theater and IRT Theater, “My Onliness” is sprinkled with songs and performed in English and American Sign Language, with two graceful, glamorous Court Mediums (Malik Paris, who also plays the lobster, and Dickie Hearts) signing the show. (Artistic sign language direction is by Alexandria Wailes and Kailyn Aaron-Lozano.) The musicians, Joanie Brittingham and Drew Fleming, are comparatively subtle presences onstage — until the show turns operatic and Brittingham unleashes her lovely soprano.Lyons calls his play “an homage to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,” the early 20th-century, anti-totalitarian avant-gardist who was a visual artist as well as a playwright. With a crimson, alley-style set by Jungah Han, vivid lighting by Christina Tang and phantasmagorical costumes by James Terrell and Brittani Beresford, this show is saturated with color and tinged with the absurd. Occasionally delicate, it’s more often chaotic, and gleefully so.And while it’s a political play — “You have to wonder why someone doesn’t just kill him,” the Writer says of the Mad King — it’s less about plot than about a near onslaught of sensation, some of which is lost to poor sight lines.“My Onliness” is the kind of show that in its muchness may leave you slightly mystified. But there’s an unhinged jollity to it, too. It is a welcome gust of weird.“This and That” at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens uses shadow puppets and projections to create a plotless landscape of music and morphing shapes.Maya SharpeAt the Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, Queens, the Institute of Useless Activity’s “This and That” is also experimental, but it occupies the other end of the overload spectrum. Its medium is light and shadow.Created by Steven Wendt and Phil Soltanoff, and performed by Wendt, one of the Blue Men of Blue Man Group, it is a slip of a show — no plot or dialogue, just projections, shadow puppetry, music.Presented with the Bushwick Starr and directed by Soltanoff, it’s soothing stuff. The first section gets gently psychedelic, with kaleidoscopic colors and morphing shapes, and lots of following an emerald-green light. If you have a favorite edible, I imagine that preshow would be a fine time to indulge.Later Wendt makes shadow puppets, which are variously impressive — such as the form of an adult and a child, sweetly rocking — and perplexing. There was one that I never did figure out.A grain of salt: At the performance I saw, someone in the front row was shooting cellphone video for the Chocolate Factory’s archives. In a show about light and darkness, a brightly glowing phone screen is as loud as a shout, and as disruptive. I might have been able to lose myself more to the experience without that.It is a playful production, though, with a spirit of inquiry. In just under an hour, it doesn’t add up to much, but, then again, the clue is in the name. “This and That” is a sampling — curated odds and ends.My OnlinessThrough Sept. 24 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.This and ThatThrough Sept. 24 at the Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      ‘Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘The Harder They Come’ Part of Public Theater Season

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      Two new works by Suzan-Lori Parks will be included in a season that delves into “relationships between Black and white America.”The Public Theater’s 2022-23 season will feature a mix of works rooted in history and new pieces that speak to current cultural shifts — toward racial justice, equity and disability rights. The season kicks off with a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s bid to move into a house in a white neighborhood of Chicago, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Performances are scheduled to begin Sept. 27.This is not O’Hara’s first interpretation of the classic: He also directed a version in 2019, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. (The Public Theater said this will be a new production, not a remounting of the Williamstown staging.) He is also a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”), and in 2010 he wrote his own sequel to Hansberry’s play, “The Etiquette of Vigilance.”The season will also include the New York premiere of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” — conceived by Greig Sargeant, and developed it as member of Elevator Repair Service, and directed by John Collins — starting Sept. 24. The play re-enacts a 1965 debate between the writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an architect of the 20th-century conservative movement, for which they were asked if “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The show had its premiere last fall at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said he wants to help put Hansberry and Baldwin “back at the center of our dramatic tradition.” Baldwin, a towering literary figure, found less success as a dramatist, partly because of the mostly white cultural gatekeepers of the ’60s and ’70s. Hansberry became the first Black woman to be produced on Broadway when “A Raisin in the Sun,” premiered there in 1959, but died just a few years later in 1965.“It’s absolutely vital for our understanding of this current moment, particularly in terms of relationships between Black and white America,” Eustis said in an interview. “It’s also saying, ‘Hey, Shakespeare isn’t the only classic voice that matters.’”The upcoming slate of shows balances lessons from the past with insights into the future of theater. The New York premiere of “Where We Belong,” by Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe, grapples with the legacy of Shakespeare and colonization. Mei Ann Teo will direct the show, which is being produced with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Performances are set to begin Oct. 28.For Eustis, Sayet’s solo piece fits well into the current cultural movement. “It’s a wave that has picked us up and thrown us forward, and said, ‘It is time to really deal with the legacy of slavery,’” Eustis said. “‘It is time to really turn and fundamentally alter race relations in this country.’”Artists who have previously had works staged at the Public — like Suzan-Lori Parks, the theater’s writer in residence; James Ijames; and Erika Dickerson-Despenza — will return this season with new plays.Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” which will be staged in November, began as a collection of plays that the playwright wrote each day from March 2020 to April 2021. It will be followed by “The Harder They Come,” featuring Jimmy Cliff’s songs and a book by Parks, in the winter of 2023. The work is a new musical adaptation of the 1972 Perry Henzell film, about a young singer (played by Cliff) in Jamaica eager to become a star only to become an outlaw after being pushed to desperate circumstances. Tony Taccone will direct, with codirection by Sergio Trujillo, and choreography is by Edgar Godineaux.“That longevity of a relationship with a major artist is hugely important, not only to Suzan-Lori, but to making a statement to the field that it’s possible to spend a life in the theater,” Eustis said. “You can actually keep your feet in the theater and ground your whole career.”“Good Bones,” written by Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Fat Ham,” which is currently onstage at the Public in its New York premiere), will have its world premiere in the spring of 2023. The play, directed by Saheem Ali, explores gentrification and the growing price of the American dream. “Shadow/Land,” by Dickerson-Despenza (who won the Blackburn Prize for her play “Cullud Wattah”) and directed by Candis C. Jones, is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The Public produced it as an audio play during the pandemic. Performances also begin in spring 2023.Ryan J. Haddad will make his Off Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories,” about strangers he encounters while navigating a city not built for cerebral palsy, in the winter of 2023. Jordan Fein is directing the play, produced by the Bushwick Starr and presented by the Public. It probes discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. More

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      ‘Quince’ Review: A Mexican American Tale That Explains Too Much

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      The new play, about a 15-year-old girl and her impending quinceañera, creates a fitting party vibe. If only the script didn’t clarify every cultural reference.In the backyard of a modest house with a thriving garden, a woman in a brimmed hat festooned with streamers bends over the flowers, tending to them silently. Her face a mask, she pays no attention to the pair of teenage sweethearts in the midst of a private talk.“That’s my grandma,” says Cindy, whose yard this is.“I thought your grandma was dead,” Kaitlyn says.She is, Cindy confirms: buried in Mexico and everything. But after her grandmother had a fight with her cousin, who was interred in a neighboring grave, “she left there, came here.” Now she hangs out in the garden, looking after the greenery.“This is why I don’t invite you over,” Cindy says, unsurprised by her girlfriend’s confusion; Kaitlyn is white, after all. “I can’t explain all this stuff all the time.”The creators of “Quince,” the shimmery immersive production that inaugurates the Bushwick Starr’s new theater in a former dairy plant in Brooklyn, have the opposite impulse. Written by Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez and directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos, this too-educative play — presented with their company, One Whale’s Tale — wants to invite all of us into its story of Cindy and her impending quinceañera, a coming-of-age celebration to mark her 15th birthday. To achieve that, it is more than willing to explicate Mexican and Mexican American culture for its audience every step of the way.To be fair, white American theatergoers have come to expect that kind of coddling, and no one wants to parade the complexity of their heritage in front of people who don’t understand it. But I’m with Cindy on this. Constant footnoting is exhausting — a drag on the festivities and also on the drama. Of which, in her life, she has plenty.Raised by her strict single mother, Maria (Brenda Flores), in a family so devoutly Roman Catholic that the parish priest is a regular presence in their home, Cindy (Sara Gutierrez) is squeamish about more than just explaining her grandmother’s ghost. She’s also embarrassed by her family’s lack of money, uncomfortable with her queerness and terrified of how Maria would react if she found out about it.Performed mostly in English, partly in Spanish, “Quince” traces Cindy’s journey toward self-acceptance — and Maria’s, too. Overworked and short on patience, Maria is carrying her own unwarranted shame that needs exorcising: the spiritual damage of having been branded sinful when she was 15 and pregnant with Cindy, half a lifetime ago.Salomon (José Pérez), Maria’s anxious brother, gives Cindy the gift of gentle allyship when she comes out to him, while the affable Father Joaquin (a charming Quiroz-Vázquez) tries to facilitate reconciliation all around. (When, over a beer in the kitchen with Salomon, this seemingly decent priest nearly violates the sanctity of the confessional by divulging what Cindy said to him there, his recklessness goes mystifyingly unremarked.)Gutierrez, center, with Saige Larmer, who plays her girlfriend. Drinks are for sale, and the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space. Maria BaranovaDuring the pandemic-stricken, pre-vaccine summer of 2020, when there was almost no live theater in New York, an earlier, much shorter version of “Quince” had a handful of open-air performances at the People’s Garden in Brooklyn. In the current incarnation, a Mexican food cart sits outside the theater preshow, and ticket holders are welcome to buy meals that they can eat during the performance. Drinks are for sale inside, where the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space decorated for Cindy’s celebration. (Scenic design is by Tanya Orellana; Tsivicos is credited as the creative director.)With a stage at one end of the long room for the terrific band (Marilyn Castillo, Andrés Fonseca, Juan Ospina and Sebastian Angel), an aisle down the center that lets the actors move among the audience and three mini-sets scattered throughout, it is a good-looking production, beguilingly lit by Mextly Couzin, with costumes by Scarlet Moreno.But the show feels inorganic and at odds with itself, straining toward mystical expression and physical abandon yet tethered to an earthbound script that meanders for too long before arriving at Cindy’s party. Occasionally it has the tone of an after-school special — albeit one that breaks into cumbia music and includes, toward the end, a Selena impersonator (Tsivicos). This play doesn’t dance nearly as much as it wants to, and its ghosts and apparitions (in beautiful masks by Quiroz-Vázquez, Zoë Batson and Courtney Escoto) fit awkwardly alongside the sometimes groan-worthy comedy.The romance between Cindy and Kaitlyn (Saige Larmer) is sweet; the healing that Maria eventually finds is a benevolence. But the show feels dumbed down, its magic dulled and focus diluted by a determination to be understood at an elementary level by people from the broader culture — even the ones who gravitate toward new work in industrial spaces in Bushwick.Trusting the audience is a risky undertaking. But we’re more curious, and more comfortable with artful ambiguity, than “Quince” gives us credit for.QuinceThrough June 26 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More