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    Theater to See in September 2023: ‘Ulysses,’ ‘The Pianist’ and More

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    Six shows and a fringe festival are among this month’s highlights in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a bit beyond.Headlines about the theater industry’s troubles have been easy to find lately: layoffs, closures, shrinking audiences and seasons. The good news? There’s still a lot of theater out there.Philadelphia Fringe FestivalFringe theatergoing is a crapshoot; that’s pretty much a rule. But there is adventure to be had in plotting your way through hundreds of events, almost all of them uncurated. Circus, dance, comedy, cabaret, kids’ fare and more are part of the 27th year of this festival. Ticket prices are low, and offerings include a handful of digital shows. Sept. 7-24 at various locations in Philadelphia; phillyfringe.org‘The 12’The playwright Robert Schenkkan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Kentucky Cycle,” dips into musical theater as the book writer of this show, with music by Neil Berg and lyrics by both of them. The Tony Award winner John Doyle directs this tale, which unfolds among the terrified disciples of Jesus, who have gone into hiding in the chaotic aftermath of his and Judas’s deaths. Sept. 8-Oct. 29 at the Goodspeed, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org‘Bulrusher’Jordan Tyson, left, and Robert Kellogg in rehearsals for a new production of Eisa Davis’s “Bulrusher,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.Dave TavaniDuring the pandemic shutdown of in-person theater, when the playwright Paula Vogel championed underproduced plays by staging them virtually, this linguistically inventive drama by Eisa Davis got her full-throated support, and a high-profile digital production. Here is a chance to see it live, in a McCarter Theater Center-Berkeley Repertory Theater co-production. Set in a mostly white California town in 1955, it tells the story of a clairvoyant multiracial teenager who grew up there, and whose world finds new dimensions with the arrival of a Black girl from the South. The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007, when Vogel was on the jury. Sept. 13-Oct. 7 at the McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, N.J.; mccarter.org‘Lunar Eclipse’A deftly nuanced, easily knowing depiction of marriage won the playwright Donald Margulies the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his domestic comedy “Dinner With Friends.” Now he returns to that territory with this new play, starring Karen Allen and Reed Birney as a long-wed couple having drinks on their Midwestern farm, watching a lunar eclipse on a summer night. James Warwick directs the world-premiere production. Sept. 15-Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org‘Ulysses’Not even Elevator Repair Service, the venerable experimental troupe best known for “Gatz,” a marathon-length enactment of the full text of “The Great Gatsby,” is heedless enough to stage the whole of James Joyce’s run-on, epic masterwork about Leopold Bloom’s daylong odyssey through Dublin. Directed by John Collins, the company’s artistic director, this world-premiere production instead samples chunks from each of the novel’s 18 episodes, letting them erupt in all their verbosity, vulgarity, vivacity and — it is Joyce, after all — opacity. Co-directed by Scott Shepherd, who is also part of the seven-actor ensemble, it has an entirely reasonable projected running time: two hours and 15 minutes. Sept. 21-Oct. 1 at the Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; fishercenter.bard.edu‘The Pianist’This new play with music retells the story of the musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a Polish Jew in Warsaw was the basis for the Roman Polanski movie “The Pianist.” The director Emily Mann has adapted Szpilman’s book for the stage, with an original score by Iris Hond. Sept. 26-Oct. 22 at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; georgestreetplayhouse.org‘Lizzie’When a murder case is so notorious that it’s commemorated with a children’s rhyme, enduring curiosity about it is almost guaranteed. Cross that with the trans-Atlantic success of “Six,” and you arrive at this production: a Lizzie Borden rock musical with an all-female cast. Written by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner and Alan Stevens Hewitt, and directed by Lainie Sakakura, this show promises “to explore the historical record.” Sept. 29-Oct. 22 at TheaterWorks Hartford, Hartford, Conn.; twhartford.org More

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      ‘Zoey’s Perfect Wedding’ Review: The Bride’s Big Disaster

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      For affluent and educated 30-something New Yorkers, a favored set of the playwright Matthew López, a chain-hotel reception is as tacky as it gets.There isn’t enough food, the D.J. is playing Styx instead of Beyoncé, and a line for the cash bar looks like a humanitarian crisis. The bride’s big day in “Zoey’s Perfect Wedding,” streaming via TheaterWorks Hartford, is predictably a total disaster. (Would we have been invited otherwise?)If rubbernecking the collision of happily ever after with dire disappointment is your kink, buckle up. Though this ill-fated party is likely to be familiar.It’s 2008, Barack Obama has just been elected president, the economy is in the toilet, and Zoey’s college friends have been banished to a far-flung table in a drab ballroom at the Downtown Brooklyn Marriott. Zoey, played by Rachel B. Joyce, is the last of their school chums to get hitched, and this is not how they thought she’d go out. For affluent and educated 30-something New Yorkers, a favored set of the playwright Matthew López, a chain-hotel reception is as tacky as it gets.Charlie (Daniel José Molina) and Sammy (Herdlicka) at the reception.Mike MarquesNot only was Rachel (Blair Lewin) not asked to be a bridesmaid, but staving off a calamity like this one is her job — really. (She’s an in-demand wedding planner.) Sammy (Hunter Ryan Herdlicka), a sports agent impeccably dressed in a three-piece plaid suit, swipes a bottle of liquor from the bar to soothe his offended senses. (“Hey, cutie! Got any Cuervo?” he coos to an unseen male server.) And Rachel’s husband, Charlie (Daniel José Molina), is agog to hear how much more sex Sammy is having than they do (unlike the tequila that flows like water, the couple is on the rocks).Every cliché about bad weddings probably occurs during the first hour of Zoey’s. A cringe-inducing speech from a drunk guest oversharing her personal problems? Check. (Rachel really ought to know better.) A bride who shrieks and sobs and retreats to the bathroom? (Don’t forget that bottle of Cuervo.) Not until it seems as if nothing more could go wrong does the play push deeper into its exploration of relationships, which does not exactly reveal new territory: friendships wane, marriages fall apart, and romance rarely resembles a fairy tale.Unlike his two-part “The Inheritance,” an ambitious epic for which López won a Tony Award in 2021 for best play, “Zoey’s Perfect Wedding” is ready-made and on the nose, like a trifle you might pluck off the dessert table at a function less calamitous than this one. The 90-minute comedy, which premiered in Denver in 2018, predates the playwright’s saga about late-20th century gay Manhattanites, and demonstrates his sustained interest in the dynamics of connection amid the limitations of convention.No union could ever be perfect — and what does perfect even mean? — but López still defers to the value of conformity. Sammy’s open relationship becomes a point of rage for Rachel, who’s in the business of monogamy, and an occasion for Sammy to explain how gay men relate to each other differently than straight people (complete with a tutorial on anal sex). It could be provocative if the lesson weren’t so basic, and if Sammy didn’t eventually capitulate to sharing the emotional needs that are fueling the fiasco.The production, directed by Rob Ruggiero, is playful and polished. A dizzying-print carpet and bland sconces on textured walls are a suitable assault on the eyes (set and lighting design are by Brian Sidney Bembridge). And performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong, committed to the sitcom setup and believably tender as the details of their characters are more fully revealed.“Zoey’s Perfect Wedding” treats the early aughts with a certain nostalgia, a Myspace, post-George W. Bush era of social optimism when Gen X was easing into adulthood — and recognizing the potential disappointments of marriage and material achievement. The retro quality of the play’s perspective can feel almost mournful, rather than enriched with the benefit of hindsight. Letting go of youthful ideals can leave you with one hell of a hangover.Zoey’s Perfect WeddingThrough June 5 at TheaterWorks Hartford in Connecticut and streaming online; twhartford.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Walden’ Review: Getting Away From It All

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      Amy Berryman’s three-character drama, set in a one-room cabin as crises rage outside, asks how much we owe to ourselves and our world.We don’t know exactly how many years into the future Amy Berryman sets “Walden,” her incisive three-character drama. But the climate emergency has already worsened, along with a refugee crisis. Synthetic foods are now widespread. Cloning, too. War rages somewhere. (Everywhere?)“The bombs on Christmas? We could see them through one of our telescopes on the moon,” Cassie (Jeena Yi), a NASA astronaut, says by way of casual conversation.Cassie, recently returned from a lunar mission, has arrived at a secluded cabin in an undisclosed location to visit her twin sister, Stella (Diana Oh), and Stella’s partner, Bryan (Gabriel Brown). Stella had also trained as an astronaut, but she failed NASA’s physical fitness test. Bryan is an avowed Earth Advocate. He holds that the government should put money toward problems on Earth rather than investing elsewhere in the solar system. So the visit, though lubricated by bartered wine and home brew, isn’t an entirely cozy one.TheaterWorks Hartford and the director Mei Ann Teo have given the play, which runs through Aug. 29, an environmental staging, locating it in a functional one-room cabin, ringed with chicken coops and a vegetable garden, in a meadow alongside the Connecticut River. (The set, rough-hewed and ingenious, is by You-Shin Chen; Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew provides the inspired lighting.) If you can’t travel to Connecticut, TheaterWorks has made the play available for streaming, also through Aug. 29.That’s how I saw it. And if it felt wrong to watch a drama so concerned with environmentalism from a laptop, on my sofa, with a window unit whirring quietly in the background, tensions like this interest Berryman. She doesn’t situate herself as smarter than her characters, and distributes her sympathies equally among them. Still, go to Connecticut if you can, especially if you can get there by emissions-friendly means. Because that meadow looks beautiful. And birdsong and crepuscular rays are best experienced in person. Then again, there are no mosquitoes in digital theater. The filming is deft enough, and the performances — layered, unshowy — land even through the screen.“Walden” borrows its name from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” a memoir, harangue, self-help manual and work of autofiction rolled into one clothbound volume. “Walden,” which extols solitude and self-reliance, was a favorite text of Cassie and Stella’s father, also an astronaut. And Walden is the name that Stella gives to the habitat she has designed for Mars. “I sort of think it reads like a whiny hipster’s blog from 19whatever,” Cassie says dismissively of the book. She isn’t exactly wrong.Thoreau went into the woods, he wrote, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” While Berryman loads her play with vivid details and plenty of plot mechanics, it’s Thoreau’s question of how to live and what constitutes a good life that animates her. Should we live for ourselves or for others? Engaged with the present or focused on the future? What do we have to sacrifice to live in community and what do we have to forfeit if we live without it?It’s probably that last question, which became a lot less rhetorical during the pandemic, that lends the play its poignancy. The humans of “Walden,” thrust together for this visit, are responding to various disasters — natural, unnatural, interpersonal — and trying their best to treat one another decently.The play never fully resolves its philosophical dilemmas, except to suggest that no philosophy will fit everyone comfortably. Even Thoreau, who preached self-reliance while famously bringing his laundry home to his mother, might have agreed. “Heaven,” he wrote, “is under our feet as well as over our heads.” So why not have both?WaldenThrough Aug. 29 at 100 Meadow Road, Windsor, Conn. and online; twhartford.org/events/walden. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More