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    Pride Month 2024: An Abundance of Theater of All Stripes

    From Broadway to the city’s smaller stages, a flurry of shows with wide-ranging appeal, familiar faces and rising talent.American theater has long been more welcoming to queer lives and stories than Hollywood has been, so the abundance of shows during Pride Month is unsurprising. It’s also overwhelming — there is just so much to see.On Broadway, queer characters play central roles in productions as starkly different as “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album, and Paula Vogel’s autofictional “Mother Play,” starring Jessica Lange. In the Max Martin jukebox “& Juliet,” a romance involving Juliet’s nonbinary best friend makes up a sweet subplot.And of course, the gayest show of the year returns on June 26, when Cole Escola’s madcap comedy “Oh, Mary!” — about Mary Todd Lincoln’s secret life and aspirations — begins previews on Broadway after a popular run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. As Joshua Barone wrote in his review, “Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’”Cole Escola, left, as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” which is moving to Broadway after a run at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusannah Millonzi, left, and Purva Bedi in Bailey Williams’s “Coach Coach.”Maria BaranovaSave some money for the city’s smaller stages, though, because they are offering a flurry of shows for Pride Month and are where you can spot rising talent.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 ‘Usus,’ Pig Latin Gets Lost in Translation

    T. Adamson’s new comedy, which opens Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project, is about a group of worked-up Franciscan friars.As befits a play set among an order of 14th-century friars, “Usus” occasionally uses Latin words. Sort of. It’s likely that most audience members will understand “vile rat astard-bay” without resorting to a dictionary because pig Latin is still a living language.That the monks in T. Adamson’s play slip into ig-pay Atin-lay is par for the course since their speech mixes eruditely cryptic references (to those who haven’t spent time in a seminary) and a vernacular that at times feels ripped from TikTok.The show, which opens the 2024 edition of Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project in the East Village of Manhattan, is about a small group of Franciscan friars worked up by Pope John XXII (pronounced X-X-I-I) declaring their vow of poverty heretical. After all, the brothers (pronounced bros) are merely following the precepts of their patron saint, Francis of Assisi, and that shouldn’t make them dissidents.In between preparing a letter of complaint to their boss, the men go about their brotherly business. Bernard (Ugo Chukwu), for example, is accumulating scientific knowledge about the mole rats rooting in the garden. JP (Annie Fang) is a young goofball who often finds himself awed by the brusque, brainy Paul (Crystal Finn, whose own play “Find Me Here” closes out Summerworks). “It’s so cool how you know all this lore and expanded universe stuff,” JP says after Paul brings up the First Council of Nicaea.JP (Annie Fang), right, is a young goofball; Paul (Crystal Finn), is brusque and brainy. Maria BaranovaPaul is a bit of an alpha bro, more articulate than the others, more learned — or at least more willing to wield his knowledge — and he directs the writing of the letter to the Pope, instructing Bernard to include the accusation that “John X-X-I-I is the earthly materialization of Antichrist.”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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    ‘Grief Hotel,’ an Absurdist Play With a Touch of Anemia

    Liza Birkenmeier’s abstract play is a unique exploration of romantic relationships but suffers from sleepy direction and a lack of character enrichment.Absurdist theater is like the naturalistic play’s overachieving older sibling. Traditional theater attempts to describe the chaos of the human condition, but absurdist works dare to enact it. Liza Birkenmeier’s “Grief Hotel” is one of those enactors, a strange, snack-sized play that closes out Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks series — a proud incubator for strange plays.Birkenmeier’s deft writing (in previous works like “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) and her affinity for morbid humor return here, and despite its title, “Grief Hotel” doesn’t simply dwell on the grim; it’s actually a dark comedy. And while all of the amusing oddness successfully depicts the madness of grief and the complexities of millennial relationships, it does so to the detriment of the play’s message and the production’s intrigue.Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) is the straight-shooting mastermind behind the grief hotel idea — a bespoke getaway for people who have experienced a tragedy: an illness, a breakup, a manslaughter charge. She’s trying to present her concept to the audience, but Birkenmeier interrupts Bobbi’s marketing pitch with a series of conversations among younger characters who are grappling with their own sense of loss: Em (Nadine Malouf), Winn (Ana Nogueira), Rohit (Naren Weiss), Teresa (Susannah Perkins) and Asher (Bruce McKenzie).Although some characters are dealing with death head-on, “Grief Hotel” lingers more on the impermanence of relationships than it does the impermanence of life. Just try to keep track of this: Em and Winn were college girlfriends. But now Em is in a relationship with an unexciting man named Rohit. Rohit is slightly attracted to Teresa. But Teresa, who is nonbinary, is already in a romantic partnership with Winn. Winn craves a novel experience and strikes up a sexual fling with Asher, a straight, married man. Em reserves most of her lust for an A.I. chatbot named Melba. In Em’s mind, the bot looks exactly like Winn.On the surface, this salacious cross-pollination might sound entertaining, but without enough exploration of these people or enough time to invest in the mess of their affairs, “Grief Hotel” feels more like a vague social experiment about impulse and desire than a provocative, character-driven piece of theater.Vagueness seems to be its intention. The scenic design collective called dots cloaks the set with the drab, midcentury décor of a three-star motel. And Tara Ahmadinejad’s languid direction fails to pump the production with much-needed blood. The overall lack of unifying energy surely parallels our fractured, new age of digital dating (a good chunk of Birkenmeier’s script is composed of text messages read aloud), but I found it exhausting IRL.At times, I wondered if the hotel was a purgatory for all of these partnerships — the anxiety-inducing, interstitial space where relationships go to die or thrive. We never land on this, or any, conclusion, but toward the play’s end, Bobbi offers a remedy to the group’s literal and metaphorical mourning: gratitude. Gratitude for the memories shared with past loves and the ones yet to be made with future ones. This — more than time, more than medication — begins to heal all wounds. And regardless of the production’s faults, I was grateful for the reminder.Grief Hotel Through July 1 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    Summerworks Festival Opens With “Work Hard Have Fun Make History”

    Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival opener, written by ruth tang, rages against the machines and examines human alienation.Like a dog nosing around in the background, a robot vacuum cleaner is a guaranteed scene stealer. Late in the new play “Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” the unfailingly compelling actor Susannah Perkins shares the stage with one: a whirring black disk busily roaming the industrial carpet, bumbling into walls yet never toppling over edges, at least not the night I saw the show.Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie, on a call with a frantic customer whose new android assistant, an iWhip 2.0, has turned menacing.“What’s the command to make it go away?” the caller pleads.“‘Blades down, iWhip,’” Annie instructs.Perkins gives the line a perfect comic spin, but our eyes are on Annie’s own insensate labor saver. Unleash a robot and havoc may follow. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?“Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” whose title echoes an Amazon motto, is not at all on the side of the machines, but it is acutely unsettled by their rampancy in our increasingly fractionalized, disembodied culture. Written by ruth tang (who lowercases their name) and directed by Caitlin Sullivan, this is the first production in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks festival, an annual showcase for off-kilter experimentation at the Wild Project in the East Village.There is, unfortunately, a nagging sense that a tumult of tenuously related ideas and a diffuse crowd of characters have overwhelmed this thought-provoking, plot-free comedy, which above all is about human alienation: from the body, from physical presence, from other people.It is about labor, both the kind that brings home paychecks and the kind that brings babies into the world, and about out-of-control greed disguised as genius; thus a couple of amusingly dim tech-bro characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (the performer who goes by b). It is about gender identity, and sex, and coupledom, and the pain of parental rejection. It is about climate change, and artificial intelligence that gets ever smarter while remaining, in elemental ways, extremely dumb. It is about containers — shipping boxes figure heavily — and the spilling over of that which cannot be contained.Which is a lot to fit into a 75-minute show. On a utilitarian set by the design collective dots, under warehouse-stark lighting by Isabella Byrd, “Work Hard” is told in a series of fragmentary scenes that aren’t always as taut as they might have been. Elon and Jeff, for example, ramble.With much doubling by the cast of three, and some dialogue in voice-over (sound design is by Lee Kinney), the show has a progression that can be cumulative, as with a grumpily funny baby (Chen) whom we first meet in utero and follow into life. But this sharply observant, sometimes poignant, grimly comic play is too scattershot to gather force as it goes on.Work Hard Have Fun Make HistoryThrough May 30 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    ‘Bodies They Ritual’ Review: Plush Robes and Cults

    Angela Hanks’s new comedy is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where five women of color have traveled for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality.The tapas party had not gone over well: “The food was so tiny,” the guest of honor, Faye, recalled. “And I was so hungry.”So for Faye’s 65th birthday, her daughter, Marie, has invited her mother and three friends for a relaxing stay at a fancy sweat lodge. The cantankerous Faye is not crazy about that, either. And that’s even before the cult members turn up.Angela Hanks’s bittersweet new comedy, “Bodies They Ritual,” is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where the five women (four are African American and one is Bengali American) have traveled from Dallas for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality. There are hot stones and plush white robes, chats by the fire pit and periods of zoning out. There are also the uncomfortable revelations and colorful encounters that pop up whenever Americans’ fictional characters go on retreats (see: Bess Wohl’s play “Small Mouth Sounds,” which takes place at a silent retreat, or the book and series “Nine Perfect Strangers”).“Bodies They Ritual” — the third and final play in this year’s edition of the Clubbed Thumb company’s Summerworks series — revolves around a series of meetings between the visitors and assorted locals. Naturally, the locals help excavate a few truths, but somehow there don’t seem to be any earth-shattering changes for anybody. Whatever metaphorical splinter was lodged under a character’s skin at the start is pretty much still there at the end, a constant reminder of past choices and roads taken, or not.Marie (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), for example, prefers to keep her relationships free from romantic entanglements. Faye (Lizan Mitchell), a retired hairdresser, picks at what she sees as her daughter’s idiosyncrasies, like her taste in music as a kid, or Marie’s decision to focus on her career as the manager for a professional sports team and forgo children. While the relationship between the two women feels commonplace, Hanks adorns it with offbeat details that often materialize almost out of the blue, like Faye’s spur-of-the-moment rendition of the Sublime song “Santeria.”Similarly, when Faye’s friend Toni (Denise Burse) fantasizes about seeing her late husband again just so she can tell him how much she still loathes him, Hanks seeds her angry monologue with surreal specificity — “I want to hit him in the head with a candelabra.”Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail) and Dawn (Kai Heath) are acolytes in “Bodies They Ritual.”Marcus MiddletonThis technique applies to the locals, like a teenage barista (Bianca Norwood) who tells Toni that she was named for her mother’s “third favorite thrash metal band,” Sepultura. “I consider myself lucky my name isn’t Anthrax,” she tells Toni.Best, or at least strangest of all are Queen Harvest (Emily Cass McDonnell), the Galadriel of New Mexico, and her acolytes Dawn (Kai Heath) and Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail, coming up with some strikingly kooky line readings).Hanks, whose “Wilder Gone” was in the 2018 edition of Summerworks, has a dry, tart tone that is well served by the director Knud Adams. He wrings finely tuned performances from the excellent cast and never oversells the comedy, letting a raised eyebrow, a side glance or a throwaway line do a lot of work. This is especially effective since Hanks, to her credit, refrains from open conflicts and cathartic resolutions — Santa Fe may peddle enlightenment, but this playwright does not take the bait. Admittedly, “Bodies They Ritual” does not quite cohere into a whole, but its parts are wonderful. They may be tiny, but they add up to a full meal.Bodies They RitualThrough July 2 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

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    Review: In ‘Spindle Shuttle Needle,’ History With Strings Attached

    With war as a backdrop, Gab Reisman’s lively comedy is content to hang out with a motley group of women at the dawn of modern capitalism.A siege is terrifying. It is profoundly disorienting. It is also, as Gab Reisman argues in her lively, quasi Marxist comedy “Spindle Shuttle Needle,” kind of a bummer.“I should be painting outside and going to book club!” moans Charlotte, a young woman of good family. “I should be visiting Dresden and studying Swedish.”Instead, Charlotte (Monique St. Cyr), who may have done something dumb with some sensitive diplomatic letters, spends her days hiding in the rough-hewed cottage of Tilda (Mia Katigbak), a weaver. Hanni (Zoë Geltman), Tilda’s daughter, and Jules (Florencia Lozano), an Italian refugee with a criminal past, also sojourn there. The time is late in the Napoleonic wars and the place is somewhere in or near Saxony. As the women spin wool into yarn and weave yarn into blankets, the sound of a battle rumbles just outside the wooden doors.“Spindle Shuttle Needle,” a winner of Clubbed Thumb’s past biennial commission, joins a jauntily postmodern company of plays that refract history through the insouciant lens of the present. (Watching it, on the narrow stage of the Wild Project, I thought of recent and semi-recent Off Broadway plays such as David Adjmi’s “Marie Antoinette,” Jordan Harrison’s “The Amateurs,” Jen Silverman’s “The Moors.”) The commission prompted writers to think through the work of the playwright Caryl Churchill, and Reisman’s comedy has echoes of Churchill’s early plays, like “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire” and “Vinegar Tom.”But that comparison isn’t all that instructive. Reisman has a couple of big themes in mind — the transition from an artisan economy to a capitalist one, the role of women in war. But the Marxist analytics are pretty limited. And the depredations of war (embodied in the arrival of a young soldier, played by Seth Clayton) are never staged with enough realism to fully register. There’s a frisky refusal to reckon with what life might have been like in a besieged Germany two centuries ago and an incomplete attempt to suggest what any of this might mean to us now. None of which means that “Spindle Shuttle Needle” isn’t a very nice time.Under Tamilla Woodard’s direction, the play works best as a hangout comedy about the borderline witchy things that women get up to when they are left in close quarters and cramped circumstances, when they are left mostly alone. Occasionally, Reisman flirts with a plot. Will Hanni find her brother? Will Charlotte’s secret be discovered? Will Tilda, a loom genius, be permitted to join the all-male weaver’s guild? And hey, what’s that brand on Jules’s neck? Yet Reisman’s greater interest is in how these very different women fill their time and their stew pot, how they jostle along together.And so we get scenes in which they dose one another with herbal tinctures; they pick nits out of one another’s hair; they kill a chicken for dinner; they clean the pelt of a rabbit; they tell stories, like one involving a crow, a mouse and a sausage. (That fable is a little Aesop, a little Brothers Grimm, a lot Reisman.)Also, they spin, which is played here as a frankly erotic activity. Even Tilda’s instructions for handling the thread seem freighted with double entendre.“Wet your fingers then slide it along the twist,” she says. “Push and release. Push and release. Find the rhythm for yourself then keep it steady. Slide. You feel it?” Let’s just say that yes, Charlotte feels it.Katigbak is a treasure of Off Off Broadway, and remains so here, as does Tina Benko, who plays a rascally entrepreneur. St. Cyr, Geltman and Clayton are somewhat less familiar, and Lozano is better known from television. Each is given space and language to dazzle in the tidy confines of Frank J. Oliva’s stonework set, lit by Barbara Samuels, in playful, slightly silly costumes by Dina El-Aziz. The overall pattern of “Spindle Shuttle Needle” isn’t especially imposing, but the individual threads still shine.Spindle Shuttle NeedleThrough June 16 at Clubbed Thumb, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. More

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    Review: In ‘California,’ a Road Trip and a Detour Into Darkness

    The playwright Trish Harnetiaux’s new show, set entirely in a car, follows a family of travelers. It bravely, if not entirely satisfyingly, explores alternate realities.Long ago, in a time before cellphones and overhead video players, a family road trip meant engaging in conversation, listening to the radio together or possibly sitting in more or less companionable silence for hours on end. A road trip could be a bonding experience, or it could become a contemplation of existential boredom.“California,” the playwright Trish Harnetiaux’s new show, bravely, if not entirely satisfyingly, ventures into this setup: Not only does it take place entirely in a car, it also ponders the possibility of a multiverse folding into coexisting realities.Or something. “California” is like a maddening Google Map offering confusing routes from starting point A to destination infinity.The show follows a family of five traveling the 1,300 miles from Spokane, Wash., to Huntington Beach, Calif. “My dad was confident we could drive it in one shot,” says Lizzie (played by Mallory Portnoy, Gertie in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”). “No stopping.”Lizzie, who is 13 at the time of the trip, is flanked by 14-year-old Tucker (Ethan Dubin) and 17-year-old Rob (Jordan Bellow) in the back seat. The siblings take turns commenting on the action, and at first it seems as if Harnetiaux is setting up a conventionally amusing memory play peppered with nostalgic details: Rob wears guyliner and a Cure T-shirt; the mother (Annie Henk) consults a paper map, before falling asleep underneath it; the father (Pete Simpson), in his plaid shirt, looks like a Trad Dad doll.“California” is certainly amusing, though not conventional, neither of which comes as a surprise from Harnetiaux. She displayed a flair for the dryly surreal in “Tin Cat Shoes” (2018), which was presented, as this new show is, as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series (“What the Constitution Means to Me,” “Tumacho”). And her very funny multipart podcast play, “The MS Phoenix Rising,” featured an experimental director trying to stage Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist one-act “The Chairs” aboard a cruise ship.“California” is a particularly good showcase for non sequiturs and dream logic, as when Mom starts humming nonsense words and Lizzie says, “Mom, that’s not, like, a song.”“It could be,” her mother replies.But as with “The Chairs,” which Ionesco described as a “tragic farce,” the show takes on a darker tone as unreliable narrators bend memory and reality into an ominous tangle of confusing chronologies and alternate possibilities. The ground is constantly shifting away from both the characters and the viewers.Will Davis’s production is best when conjuring an ominous mood constantly overshadowed by death — foretold, remembered, alluded to, imagined. It can be the passing of one of the characters. Or it can be the mass deaths of nuclear Armageddon; the road trippers drive by the Hanford nuclear plant, created as part of the Manhattan Project. And the car, evoked with just chairs and the lighting designer Oona Curley’s atmospheric cues, becomes a claustrophobic enclosure traveling across space as well as time.Yet these elements do not jell, and it often feels as if Harnetiaux has an unsure grasp on what she is trying to say, or how to say it. Modern expressions, for example, pop up during the period scenes: Dad remembers that some of his college friends “had Big Halloween Energy” and admonishes his kids to “be better.” Whether these are mistakes, a clue that the reminiscing siblings are projecting into the past or just easy laugh lines, the result is distracting. And the show’s very slipperiness turns against itself: Being hard to pinpoint can be allusively mysterious, or it can come across like obfuscation.CaliforniaThrough May 31 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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    ‘Woman’s Party’ Review: At War With Inequality, and Each Other

    In Rinne B. Groff’s historical comedy, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1947 looks awfully familiar today.Clubbed Thumb is a small New York theater company committed to “funny, strange and provocative” new plays, no more than 90 minutes long, by living American writers whose “questioning, formally inventive, theatrical” work features “substantial and challenging roles for all genders” as well as — here’s the killer — “a sense of humor.”A tall order, yet Clubbed Thumb has hit that sweet spot astonishingly often, in works like “Men in Boats,” “Of Government,” “Wilder Gone,” “Lunch Bunch” and “Tumacho,” to name just one in each of the past five years. Alas, “Tumacho,” a horse opera featuring a chorus of cactuses, was the last we heard from the company. The show opened on March 2, 2020, and closed, with the rest of the theater world, 10 days later.Now, like some kind of belated dramaturgical groundhog, Clubbed Thumb returns with “The Woman’s Party,” by Rinne B. Groff, to predict more funny-strange theater ahead. Directed by Tara Ahmadinejad and available online through Aug. 31, it checks off every item on the company’s wish list, and then one more: It’s historical.I don’t just mean that it’s momentous, though in some ways it is, if something so nearly silly can also be nearly profound. I mean that it is based closely — and yet imaginatively — on the true story of an important turning point in the American struggle for equal rights. In 1947, the National Woman’s Party, which almost three decades earlier had secured passage of women’s suffrage in the United States, stood on the brink of an even bigger victory: the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.In 1947?Yes, and as Groff unpacks the reasons such a victory did not pan out, we quickly come to recognize the internal conflicts that have painfully delayed, and in some cases undone, so many breakthroughs ever since.Clockwise from top left: Rosalyn Coleman, Connie Winston, Emily Kuroda and Marceline Hugot in the Clubbed Thumb production.via Clubbed ThumbIn the case of the National Woman’s Party, founded in 1916 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, part of the conflict was generational. By 1947, with Paul long ensconced as the organization’s center of power — even if her power was nominally delegated to others — a struggle had broken out between her supporters and those who felt that new strategies and new blood were required to win the E.R.A. battle. How a progressive like Paul (who actually wrote the amendment) came to be perceived as a reactionary is one of the many paradoxes Groff neatly sets up.That setup is engineered into the play’s three-part structure. In Part One, we meet most of the relevant characters — all women over 50 — who are either planning a “coup” at the organization’s headquarters in Washington or looking for ways to foil it. The plotters want the party to embrace a broader agenda than just equal rights and a broader population than just wealthy white women; Paul’s cadre wants to limit their efforts to winning, at whatever cost to coalition building and diversity.Though the casting is mostly colorblind, it remains notable that Doris Stevens, Paul’s protégée and the leader of the uprising, is played by Rosalyn Colman, a Black actor. Groff introduces her as a noir antiheroine blowing smoke rings while jazz plays, suggesting a challenge to the establishment both of its time and beyond it. In Colman’s canny performance, Stevens is also complicated enough to undermine the authenticity of her stated motives; though a fan of Freudian analysis, she fails to notice that she has scheduled the takeover on her mentor’s birthday, Jan. 11.In Part Two, the coup occurs, to some degree based on the actual events of that night, including the singing of hymns, an emergency call to the Pinkertons and the repurposing of ironing boards as battering rams. Groff, juggling 10 characters, sometimes creates a blur, but the fine cast (including Alma Cuervo, Laura Esterman and Lizan Mitchell) corrects for that problem with stylish semi-caricatures.In any case, as seen in Zoom-like boxes representing various rooms in the headquarters — the ingenious virtual dollhouse set is by the design collective called dots — the women are perfectly clear in their allegiances, even if they are hopelessly divided within them.Groff’s dialogue, tying and untying ideological knots as she sketches their positions, keeps what could be leaden exposition bubbling. (So does Ahmadinejad’s sprightly pacing.) Gradually the knots coalesce into one giant tangle as the story builds to Part Three and the final confrontation between Stevens and Paul, played by the fantastically dry Rebecca Schull in a bathrobe.Here the play expands in several useful directions. One leads to a Shavian orgasm of argumentation, with its Jenga-like pileup of rhetoric that dares you to agree, and then deconstruct that agreement, at every turn.“Shouldn’t the organization we create recapitulate the principles we stand for?” Stevens asks.“No,” Paul answers. “The organization we create should achieve the principles we stand for.”Another direction, speaking to the “strange” and “formally inventive” parts of Clubbed Thumb’s agenda, extends the play’s metatheatrics and anachronisms into haunting new territory. Earlier in the story, when characters slyly acknowledged that they were actors in a play, the excuse for it seemed to be humor — a good enough excuse in my book.But now, as Stevens and Paul divulge to one another what will happen deep in the future, the effect is more biting. Paul, who as she lay dying in 1977 assumed the E.R.A. would soon be law, is crushed to be given a premonition of the truth in 1947. And Stevens, learning of her own subsequent dabblings in red-baiting and nativism, must look at her attempted overthrow of the party in a new, less flattering context.To the extent “The Woman’s Party” asks us, too, to re-examine our activist strategies in light of our societal goals — and vice versa — this is bracing political theater. But it is also theatrical politics, in the sense that it asks us to consider the role of drama in a time of upheaval.That’s why Groff, who in plays like “The Ruby Sunrise” often uses historical change to examine current conflict, is such a good fit for Clubbed Thumb. Over the last decade, and particularly over the last year, playmakers have been struggling to balance the traditional values of dramatic beauty and entertainment with the need to address, in radical terms, a radical moment.“The Woman’s Party” not only tells a story about that struggle but also, with its wit and light hand, and even its occasional raggedness, is a fine new example of it.The Woman’s PartyThrough Aug. 31; clubbedthumb.org More