One is tempted to execute a stunt review of the new Tartuffe in heroic couplets, as the late, great Richard Wilbur translated Molière’s comedies for six decades, beginning with The Misanthrope in 1955. For example, I could open with:

This shoddy Tartuffe with its lazy rhymes

Is a cracked church bell that gratingly chimes.

But I won’t subject you to my doggerel; I had to choke down so much already at New York Theatre Workshop. Lucas Hnath’s version of the 1669 French classic adopts a defiantly dopey attitude to the original Alexandrine verse, spitting out countless false rhymes (special/medal), pointless recycling (bastard/disaster—twice!) and triplets that seem to relish their own insipidity (“to touch your ass is no more crass than worshipping at holy mass”). Wilbur opted for a sleek line of iambic pentameter, and his bouncy euphony, highly playable and delightful on the ear, remains the gold standard. Hnath’s effort, by contrast, is a collegiate prank, a hectic hash of profanity, stoner chuckles and feints at moral philosophy. He seems unconcerned if his rhyming falls flat or his characters sound like idiots. The outraged matriarch Mme Pernelle (Bianca Del Rio, haute camp) lambastes her relatives for being louche and uncouth:

I am stunned you think it’s okay that the cleaning woman has so much say, be that as it may,
go ahead and let the maid just have her way, I can no longer stay and watch you all fall into
moral decay.

I’m not cosplaying rhyme police; this is cheap stuff. Once you hear Hnath’s weakness for flat or tinny notes, you can’t un-hear it, and it will bug you for two hours sans intermission. For some reason, he formats his script in prose, as if to bury the juvenile wordplay.

What a misguided affair from such an accomplished team. Director Sarah Benson has collaborated intensely with living or modern playwrights (her productions of An Octoroon, Fairview, and Blasted were unforgettable) but sinks under the weight of a hyper-stylized design and resolutely unfunny text. Hnath has been justly celebrated for form-bending in weird, metatheatrical dazzlers such as Dana H. and A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney (which Benson staged at Soho Rep). It’s unclear what the goal was here. Drunk Theatre does French Baroque? Hip-hop Molière without actual rapping?

Tartuffe is a clockwork farce about the hypocrisy of moralizers and the credulity of followers. Wealthy patriarch Orgon (David Cross) has fallen under the spell of Tartuffe (Matthew Broderick), a nondenominational preacher who espouses a vaguely Catholic credo of sexual abstinence and mortification of the flesh. Naturally, this doesn’t prevent Tartuffe from gorging on Orgon’s larder or lusting after his attractive wife, Elmire (Amber Gray, glamour and grace). Orgon’s son, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad, petulant delight) sees through the hypocrite—as does mouthy maid Dorine (Lisa Kron) and mousy daughter Mariane (Emily Davis). Perpetually posing with a frozen smile and singsong delivery, Ikechukwu Ufomadu pops in now and then as Mariane’s nincompoop suitor Valère. There’s a tasting menu of acting styles clashing onstage, but Ufomadu really seemed to be in his own play. I kinda wish I’d been at that one.

To be sure, it’s a murderer’s row of gifted actors, and David Cross (Arrested Development) cannot not get laughs playing a confident dolt. Davis simpers and grimaces deliciously as Orgon tries to arrange a marriage between her and Tartuffe, and Haddad throws very amusing tantrums. Kron seems baffled by the world around her, but manages dry one-liners. As Elmire’s brother and a voice of reason, Francis Jue may not have the flashiest role, but he finds a pleasing balance of witty restraint and outrage. About Matthew Broderick, I don’t know what to say. After seeing umpteenth performances from him on Broadway and Off-Broadway, I’m still shocked by his limited range and strangulated physical vocabulary. His Tartuffe talks (and walks) like Kermit the Frog in a frock coat. His understated squeaks render some lines droll, but on the whole, Broderick recedes into the muted green walls (mock-Louis XIV furnishings by set collective dots).

Benson and her designers deserve credit for not setting Tartuffe in a modern-day megachurch or MAGA country. Her actors are arranged in a hermetically sealed, cartoon version of 17th-century France, with sumptuous costuming by Enver Chakartash so colorful and candied it’s like a crate of macarons on legs. Sound design by Peter Mills Weiss mixes boxing-match bells and industrial droning, and interstitial dances by Raja Feather Kelly gesture (superfluously) toward the characters’ lives of leisure, like mimed ballroom dancing and tennis. Heather Christian contributes a dirge at the end that seems to point out everyone is guilty of moral certitude, which kills the already decomposing satirical vibe.

Look, finding comic gold in Molière is famously hard. The antique Gallic humor is refined and mannered, the Wilbur translations, as mentioned, are hard to beat, and the structured nature of the farce needs a super-deft, well-directed group of clowns to keep it popping. This past summer, Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid actually worked. Adapter Jeffrey Hatcher opted for a prose translation that went straight for the funny bone. It was all there: visual gags, silly accents, runaway mugging, jokes about Les Misérables. Punch lines that punched. At New York Theatre Workshop, it’s style without substance—which Molière mocked in the first place.

Tartuffe | 2 hrs. No intermission. | New York Theatre Workshop | 79 East 4th Street | 212-460-5475 | Click Here For Tickets  

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Iteration is the dramatist’s most basic tool; pet expressions make for character metadata. “Gosh-golly, Julie…” reminds us that Julie is Julie and the speaker’s a dork. In the plays of Eugene O’Neill, verbal tics accumulate so thickly it verges on self-parody. Take The Iceman Cometh, in which the author signposts the necessity of delusions, or “pipe dreams,” about 40 butt-numbing times. Spoon-feeding motif is one thing, but this is snaking a tube down the audience’s throat. In his earlier and cruder Anna Christie from 1921, O’Neill uses the sea as an all-purpose metaphor for life’s ups and downs, and he never lets us forget it. Swedish barge captain Chris Christopherson is forever harping on “dat ole Davil sea,” like a Dickens gargoyle stamped with his catchphrase. Meanwhile, Irish stoker Mat Burke’s blarney is lousy with “divil” this and “divil” that. Seafarers are hella superstitious? Got it, Gene.

Maybe O’Neill’s idioms got on my nerves because there’s little in director Thomas Kail’s staging to distract from them. Apparently, the great playwright’s estate is strict about trimming text or easing up on ethnic accents, both of which would make an overwritten semi-melodrama such as Anna Christie more palatable (even though the play is in the public domain). So St. Ann’s Warehouse is home to a slavish rendition of a piece that, a century-plus on, shows its age. Her deck creaks, her hull leaks. This stage curio that last set sail during the Clinton era stalls outside the bay.

Its opera-thin story: The aforesaid Chris (Brian d’Arcy James), a boozy yet moral coot, welcomes home his wearied, wary 20-year-old daughter, Anna (Michelle Williams). Fifteen years ago, he banished the girl to relatives in Minnesota. Chris didn’t want Anna growing up among the whores and seadogs of the New York waterfront. Irony of ironies: Anna, lacking guidance and protection, was nonetheless dragged down. Raped by a cousin, she eventually became a sex worker in St. Paul and fled to New York after her brothel was raided. The revelation of Anna’s scarlet past comes out after she has fallen for the rough and roaring Irish coal shoveler Mat Burke (Tom Sturridge), a liaison her father deplores. Over four acts, the play charts Anna’s growth from bedraggled waif to self-piloting woman. Chris and Mat’s emotional thickness renders them nearly clownish by contrast, but a vibrant rapport among the actors could give O’Neill’s “happy” ending a glimmer of hard-won hope.

While I’ve admired these talented leads separately in the past, they make a shaky threesome, unable to occupy the same world. James comes off as too clean-cut, hale and earnest for the oafish Chris, and he’s hemmed in by the Swedish accent and the aforesaid repetitions. Like a younger, British John Malkovich, Sturridge often embraces a quirky physical and vocal approach. His Mat’s all squirmy disjointed limbs, lolling head and dead eyes, droning in a porridge-thick “Oyrish” accent more Caledonian than Hibernian and frequently unintelligible. Loping about like a surly marionette with snipped strings, Sturridge seems an unappetizing match for Anna, who has endured years of men treating her “like a piece of furniture.” There’s something broken and pitiable in the stunted, fearfully Catholic Mat, but not enough dignity.

That leaves Williams, whose Anna begins abject and traumatized but ends up dominating the other two, a multitasking daughter-mother-lover. Initially, costume designer Paul Tazewell drapes the gamine actor in a lacy collar, skirt and copper-hued bucket hat when she shows up at Chris’s favorite dive bar, an East Coast antecedent of Blanche DuBois looking femme and frazzled. Anna subsequently graduates to practical pants and more gender-neutral couture and blossoms in a sensible blue dress and crimson sweater, reclining on a block before final blackout looking like the mermaid that Mat first mistakes her for. In fact, Anna is a mermaid but in reverse: She beckons sailors to a better life, not watery death.

Strong visuals could mitigate some of the lack of actor chemistry, but Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis’s modular set of wooden pallets—continually moved about and reconfigured by the cast like Lincoln Logs—grows tiresome. A greenish hedge along the upstage wall could be grass or vegetation but turns out to be hundreds of liquor bottles artfully jumbled atop each other. Allusions to booze seem redundant here. Kail stages the play with the audience in three-quarters. Sightlines don’t get off to a promising start in the first act, set in a bar, with long stretches during which we stare at backs. The scenography opens up later, garnished with the requisite fog and self-conscious manipulation of pallets, such as when Anna climbs to a higher and higher platform from which to declare independence.

Although twice Anna’s age, Williams vibrates with bruised innocence and grit beneath a porcelain veneer. As anyone who streamed Fosse/Verdon or caught her on Broadway in Blackbird nine years ago knows, the ardent performer has a knack for nervy women on the verge, just barely keeping it together. All the same, to make Anna Christie truly sing, the tortured lovers need animal magnetism: sex appeal, they used to call it. I never saw the 1993 Broadway revival, but to judge by photos, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson had the goods. That gorgeous pair met through the Roundabout production, left their partners and got hitched a year later. In Brooklyn, the showmance already happened: Williams and her director, Kail, are married, with children, and live not far from St. Ann’s in DUMBO. I sincerely hope that their next family affair takes place on a more seaworthy vessel.

Anna Christie | 2 hrs., 30 mins. with one intermission | St. Ann’s Warehouse | 45 Water Street, Brooklyn | 718-254-8779 | Click here for tickets

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Just imagine how many writers are drafting A.I. plays at this very moment: rom-coms with digital lovers; thrillers about Chatbot psychosis; social critiques of reality-warping misinfo. Bad news, folks: Jordan Harrison got there first. At least in terms of mainstream, well-received plays, Marjorie Prime touched on those topics a decade ago (after plenty of movies and TV had). Still relevant after its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, the 90-minute chamber drama sparkles and unsettles in its Broadway debut, positing that holographic avatars will remember us after we’re gone, airbrushing life’s sorrow and complexity from every snapshot. In 2025, such a message is not ahead of its time, but perfectly punctual.

Humans and their dehumanizing toys: Harrison pursued the theme earlier this year in The Antiquities (also at Playwrights), more ambitious in scope than Marjorie Prime but less successful in showcasing characters worth caring about. Here, a fine four-member ensemble under the sensitive yet clinical direction of Anne Kauffman navigates an arc familiar to anyone who’s cared for an elderly parent or survived a family in which mental illness was ignored. Its tech twist (in the future, one may talk to the virtual deceased) is digital gravy on a dysfunctional family formula.

Marjorie (June Squibb) is a frail but feisty octogenarian tended to by her middle-aged daughter, Tess (Cynthia Nixon), and Tess’s sweet-tempered husband, Jon (Danny Burstein). It’s about 40 years from now. An unseen carer named Julie looks in on Marjorie, and her occasional lapses (leaving the blinds closed) or overstepping (giving a Bible to Marjorie) provoke bursts of anger in Tess. A fourth person inhabits Marjorie’s apartment—although it’s neither a person nor capable of habitation. Walter (Christopher Lowell) is a 3D pixel version of Marjorie’s husband in his studly thirties: “Walter Prime” (does Amazon sell them?) He sits with Marjorie and asks questions about their lives, which becomes part of his memory bank and allows the creature to impersonate Walter better.

The series Black Mirror has been here, with a 2013 episode (“Be Right Back”) about a grieving wife who downloads her husband’s social media and digital footprint into an android lookalike. One would think similar technology would exist in Harrison’s future, but he downplays the world-building. The focus instead is on how minutiae from Marjorie’s past—fleeting details and tragedies—are transmitted from geriatric memory to a digital archive, then cross-checked with other input and recombined as biographical spam. The play is delicate and episodic and best enjoyed without spoilers. Tess once had a brother, and Marjorie and Walter may have passed along to their children a predisposition for depression and self-harm. If Tess’s psychological problems come across as device-y, they do provide an emotional wallop toward the end as Jon brings a new Prime up to date on the family. As humans are periodically replaced by eager and curious Primes, we tumble headlong into the uncanny valley.

If living long is a form of time travel, June Squibb is practically Gallifreyan. A spunky trouper at 96, her Broadway resumé reaches back to a stint in the original production of Gypsy in 1960. Beyond earning tropey chuckles from “salty grandmother with no effs to give,” Squibb rises to the unique affective challenge her character presents. Marjorie was born in 1977, and now she’s in her eighties. Harrison gets laughs out of a little old lady using slang expressions like “Busted!” and trying to remember the lyrics to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” (I, for one, will be mumbling R.E.M.’s early catalog in a dreadful nursing home one day.) Squibb has a frisky youthfulness that boosts the illusion—even if I doubt Gen Xers will sound quite so 1950s in their dotage. I was a little surprised Marjorie didn’t sport a tattoo or cuss more. But these are quibbles.

Nixon and Burstein turn in solid, nuanced work, carrying much of the play’s emotional weight and narrative momentum. Lowell strikes the right balance of warmth to spectrum-y strangeness in the learning bot. As for the look of the future, it’s vivid without being distractingly outlandish. Scenic designer Lee Jellinek builds coolly modern interiors, while Márion Talán de la Rosa’s clothes emphasize gender-neutral comfort. The sound design and compositions are by Daniel Kluger—which only falters when a cutesy musical button at the very end strikes a glib note.

As any cultured person knows, Tom Stoppard died two weeks ago. He didn’t leave behind any plays about robots or artificial intelligence. There was no need. Stoppard’s absurdly articulate characters and giddily recherché comedies were organic precursors of A.I.: libraries of data combed and synthesized for a general audience. Of course, Stoppard did it with style, originality and inimitable humor. One of his quotes occurred to me during Marjorie Prime. The art of the playwright, he once wrote, “was to order the flow of information from the stage to the audience.” Harrison practices that art humbly but elegantly, controlling the biographical drip from his characters into the Primes and then back to the audience, which appreciates how a person’s essence eludes the bare facts. True memory is human, imbued with love and grief. The rest is just a simulation.

Marjorie Prime | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Hayes Theater | 240 West 44th Street | 212-541-4516 | Get Tickets Here

Do you love mandatory gussying up for the theater, to see and (giggle) be seen? Do you shiver with delight, your features hidden under a frilly, lacy mask? Does it thrill you to stumble down staircases and stagger through dimly lit hallways while Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pre-recorded music pours like clotted cream through speakers? Yeah, me neither. And yet, there I was at Masquerade, the site-specific, immersive remix of The Phantom of the Opera, wondering if veteran director Diane Paulus could turn aversion into affection. Will my heart ever melt over this hideously deformed musical?

Unlike the friend who chaperoned me, a “Phan,” I didn’t catch Lloyd Webber’s melodramatic operetta as a teen, and therefore its bombastic, pop-Puccini score never imprinted on my oatmeal brain. (I’m the Phantom! I’m Christine, too!) Truth is, I didn’t appreciate musicals until I was in college and someone lent me a CD of Sondheim’s Assassins. Phantom is the gateway for those who can’t handle Sweeney Todd’s bleak, witty sadism. In reviews of the revival of Sunset Boulevard and the misbegotten Bad Cinderella, I’ve gone on record as finding Lloyd Webber’s overwrought, repetitious scores insufferable. Despite the fact that Phantom ran for a record 35 years on Broadway, I’m not alone in my distaste for its camp-gothic excesses.

But here was a golden opportunity for conversion. Paulus’s first “immersive” breakthrough (before the term was everywhere) was in the late 1990s, when she staged an experiential version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream using none of Shakespeare’s language but a slew of disco hits and mirror balls. The Donkey Show started life in a former piano store on Ludlow Street and eventually moved Off Broadway to run for years. I remember it as a sweaty blur of glitter-caked, roller-skating actors in short-shorts, pasties and huge Afros. Paulus is an old pro at taking theatrical IP and infusing wild, contemporary life into it.

If only she’d done so here. When the creative team of director Daniel Fish’s audacious Oklahoma! re-orchestrated the score for a small, bluegrass ensemble, we heard Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic tunes with fresh ears. Or when co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch framed Cats as a queer ballroom extravaganza, the music assumed a transgressive social function that turned kitty kitsch into catharsis. At Masquerade, the music is not revivified; it’s embalmed. Singers perform to pre-recorded tracks, and the canned score sounds similar to a full-orchestra cast album. Which gives each number a karaoke hollowness that the talented vocalists struggle to enliven. Imagine if instead the music were live, translated into rock, EDM or some fusion of Baroque and techno? A roving string quartet? Virtuosic a cappella? Anything.

Forget ears. How about eyeballs? No argument, Masquerade is a head-spinning fusion of 360-degree design and crowd control, jointly conceived by Lloyd Webber, Paulus and Randy Weiner (the latter an impresario behind Sleep No More). The logistics are staggering: audiences (instructed to dress semi-formal and bring masks) are admitted into a shadowy converted space on West 57th Street: six audiences enter at six staggered times, and each group sees its own Christine and Phantom pairing. When I attended, the glowing, ardent Anna Zavelson played Christine opposite Jeff Kready’s dignified yet tormented Phantom. Over two uninterrupted hours, we follow characters throughout and beneath the Palais Garnier opera house as soprano ingénue Christine is, well, groomed by the Phantom—composer, inventor, hoarder of candles—a mad, cursed artiste determined to make her a star in his works. He pines for the young singer, yet his face is deformed and he’s traumatized by a childhood as a circus freak. There’s a wealthy young man named Raoul who loves Christine, and the poor girl is torn between the two. Even by the standards of goofy opera plots, this one is thin, and the comic relief is leaden.

An army of designers and tech crew have created dozens of areas across six floors we traverse and occasionally get to sit in. Fine art creative director Shai Baitel, props designer Kathy Fabian, visual F/X designer Skylar Fox—these are just a few names behind the visual splendor. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is the resourceful dance-maker who keeps the performers moving fluidly in tight spaces around clusters of spectators. Engaging though the visual elements are, I wish (as with the music orchestrations) the costume and mask design had deviated from the original template. We watch the same dandified Phantom who has pounded his organ since the Reagan administration.

There’s so much moving about (up and down escalators, no less) and drastic trimming of dialogue that unless you’re familiar with the story of the original Phantom, it can get confusing—or you simply give up caring. We descend to the Phantom’s lair in the bowels of the opera house and make our way up to the actual roof, while visiting other spaces that function as the flies above the stage, dressing rooms and other locales. Some sections transcend gimmickry and almost approach poetry: Christine, having fainted, rests on a bed in the Phantom’s Phan Cave, and sinister hands emerge from the mattress and pillow, longing to caress her. The Phantom has a big woe-is-me number on the roof when he thinks Christine is leaving him (“All I Ask of You”): overripe but impressive. And the iconic “Music of the Night” seduction ballad acquires extra creepiness with a roomful of people ogling the scene, bathed in the glow of electric candles. (Given the prevalence of masks, I considered an allusion to Kubrick’s final film, but since we’re talking Lloyd Webber: Ears Wide Shut.)

Capitalized at $25 million and extended into next February, Masquerade tries to be a lot: a karaoke Phantom by hard-working troupers; a theme-park ride inside the world; a two-hour chunk of fan service with extra back story; an IRL mingle for Phans to play dress-up and quaff champagne in the bar afterward. What it wasn’t, for me, is fun or emotionally resonant. If you think Phantom of the Opera is legit art, that’s your problem. I’ll assume you’re not reading this, that you’re busy charging $500 on a pair of tickets. I hope the actors are well compensated, because they don’t get a bow—shameful. We all know the modern musical has to evolve to survive in the face of technology and economic precarity, but this cash-grab stunt tries to look backward and forward at once: hard to do with a silly mask on your mug.

Masquerade | 2 hrs 15 mins., no intermission | 218 West 57th Street | 212-505-5666 | Click Here For Tickets

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After the final bow of Waiting for Godot, I rushed home to my library—specifically, the 2006 Grove Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett, Volume III. Nothing. What about the PDF of the script sent by the publicist, with “JAMIE LLOYD CO.” (the director’s company) splashed proprietarily across the cover page in 72-pt Impact? Nope, the stage direction wasn’t there, either. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the spot in Waiting for Godot where Beckett has Lucky flip Estragon the bird. Estragon (Keanu Reeves) has pooh-poohed Lucky’s dancing, and the unpredictable servant (Michael Patrick Thornton) responds with a quick middle finger. After half a dozen Godots, this was new to me. As was Estragon and Vladimir (Alex Winter), their backs to each other, executing a triumphal air-guitar riff. Fans of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure registered delight throughout the Hudson Theatre. Bogus? Not a jot.

Jamie Lloyd’s staging of the 1955 avant-garde classic feels daringly fresh yet simpatico with Beckett’s shabby tramps, mysteriously trapped by a country road and a dying tree, in expectation of a Mr. Godot who never shows up. Our existential clowns while away interminable days in crotchety, circular banter that segues into suicidal despair or resigned camaraderie. Over two acts, a diptych of stasis shading into panic, the men encounter roisterous aristo Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his enigmatic slave, Lucky. A wary Boy (Eric Williams) creeps in at the end of each act to announce that Mr. G will appear the next day. So “Didi” and “Gogo” (as they’ve nicknamed each other) languish hopelessly, helpless to do anything else. In a particularly private moment, Vladimir listens to the air “full of our cries,” only to conclude, “habit is a great deadener.” He doesn’t elaborate on what exactly it deadens. Joy? Or misery, which can lead to self-slaughter? Habit may deaden happiness, but it also keeps us alive. Our two protagonists resolve to leave, but remain rooted to the spot.

As noted in a previous review of Godot (with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks), I always hear something new in the text, due to its elliptical, vaporous quality, like the shrinking memory of a dream. One thing I will not forget is purely visual: Soutra Gilmour’s monumental wooden tunnel/funnel of a set (a coup since the Beckett estate is notoriously controlling). Composed of boards of unstained wood, the structure resembles a vast drainage culvert fallen on its side or viewed from above. Estragon and Vladimir scamper up its curved sides only to slide back or topple over, a neat image for their Sisyphean days, two bowler-hatted hamsters on an unmoving wheel. Or circling the drain of life, waiting for a fatal flush. When they refer to the dead tree that most productions feature, it’s out in the audience. Various stage business—Pozzo devouring chicken and chugging from a bottle, endless repositioning of a stool or a whip—are mimed. This dematerializing concentrates our attention on the language, which the performers attack at a steady clip. At a little over two hours, this is the paciest Godot you may ever see. Also one with the boldest lighting scheme: designer Jon Clark drops a massive white moon into the upstage end of the tunnel to signify sudden nightfall, starkly silhouetting the tramps.

There’s more to savor than the brutalist design and snappy delivery: remarkable chemistry between the two leads, now in their early sixties with decades of film work behind them. The palpable affection between Reeves and Winter, and their scrupulous attention to the musical rhythms of Beckett’s demanding text, leads to a gentler, more vulnerable Didi and Gogo. Lloyd mikes the actors, so the line readings have a cinematic intimacy that gets under your skin. With a haunted, thousand-yard stare, Winter exudes a Hamlettish gloom that suits Vladimir’s status as the brains-and-thinking part of the act. Whereas Reeves’s petulant puppy of an Estragon stands more for the body: wrestling with ill-fitting boots, gobbling root vegetables or sucking on chicken bones, he suffers beatings in the night and wishes simply to sleep. Together, Vladimir and Estragon make one man, severed by a dying world.

Duos and twins pop up frequently in Godot, in allusions to the good thief and bad thief crucified beside Christ, Cain and Abel and a reference to the Boy’s brother, abused by Mr. Godot (he is spared). Likewise, the injustice of the world, the arbitrariness of power positions, are embodied in Pozzo and Lucky’s symbiotic pairing. In those supporting but pivotal roles, the phenomenal Dirden and Thornton balance the restrained, gentle approach taken by Winter and Reeves with grandstanding theatricality and vocal pyrotechnics. Dirden’s Pozzo orates like a gospel preacher making love to his own voice, and Thornton, who uses a wheelchair and for a time wears a sinister black muzzle, coos Lucky’s demented “think” monologue like it’s a benediction full of wisdom and grace. For Beckett devotees, this Godot will come across as both idiosyncratic and faithful, a weird masterwork seen and heard afresh. Fans of Bill & Ted and the John Wick franchise may be converted to theater of the absurd. Because if they attend expecting time-travel gags or hitman Gun-Fu, it’ll be a long wait.

Waiting for Godot | 2 hrs. 10 mins. w/ one intermission | Hudson Theatre | 141 West 44th Street | 855-801-5876 | Click here for tickets

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Since the inciting event of Yasmina Reza’s Art involves the valuation of cultural objects, let’s start at the price point. Would purchasing a $471 orchestra seat to the Broadway revival make you a shrewd culture vulture or a middlebrow schmuck dazzled by celebrity? Make that “celebrity.” James Corden was legit hilarious in One Man, Two Guvnors, but that was 13 years ago, before he became a late-night tryhard and the bane of Balthazar. Neil Patrick Harris still has impeccable sitcom timing. Bobby Cannavale has paid his stage dues for years—whether or not he’s right for the part. Is this cast worth half a grand? Is the play? Reza’s 1998 comedy abounds in witty chuckles and elegant structure, but it remains a slight boulevard comedy: three self-obsessed Frenchmen bickering over a pricey painting.

If I’m depreciating Art to upsell my powers of discernment, you could surmise I’m blinded by my snobbery. Then we could argue the value of criticism. If the prospect excites you, you may be the target audience for Art. It’s clever and chic, like most of Reza’s output. The French-Iranian writer has had three well-received plays on Broadway (and one off called The Spanish Play I wish I could forget). Like her younger compatriot Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother) Reza’s works are inescapably French: philosophical, refined, charmingly pretentious. She writes about upper-middle-class urbanites who present as civilized but underneath seethe with jealousy and sometimes violent aggression. In God of Carnage (2009), she pitted two married couples against each other, turning a living room into a battleground.

By comparison, Art is a breezy frolic with lower stakes. Serge (Harris) has purchased a minimalist white-on-white painting for $300,000. His culturally conservative friend Marc (Cannavale) thinks he’s lost his mind—or is a fool. A third wheel by the name of Ivan (Corden) doesn’t care much about art; he wants to play peacemaker and get a break from his nagging stepmother and fiancée. Serge and Marc, in turn, condescend to Ivan. Ivan passive-aggressively, self-pityingly lashes back. At no point does Marc tell Serge he could have spent the money on a worthy cause—refugees or such—because the play doesn’t bother to reflect any reality except the homosocial puzzle Reza created. Over the course of 90 minutes, the playwright uses a contrived setup (I never believed Serge liked the painting) to stress-test the bonds between these men.

It’s a worthy subject, especially today. Bromance is complicated. It’s not all slap hugs and fist bumps. Among male buddies, there always lurk shades of frenemy, rival and bully. Of course, this comedy premiered years before the so-called manosphere, when Andrew Tate was growing his first pubes. It’s actually refreshing to see guys who are classy and well-spoken, perhaps petty and pompous but not toxic stereotypes. The characters arrive on Broadway through French and then English filters (Christopher Hampton translated), so they have a curious mix of Gallic chauvinism balanced by Brit insecurity. Corden does a fine job as the (unexplained) English friend, whinging deftly through a bravura mid-show monologue about the logistics of his impending wedding.

Staged with customary polish and restrained flair by Scott Ellis, the blankness of the central canvas rather bleeds into the costumes and furnishings by Linda Cho and David Rockwell, respectively. The men are dressed in stylish gray, black or blue solids; the modular set that stands in for their apartments is generically modern. One understands that too much color or scenic flamboyance might upset the orderly chill of Reza’s chessboard, but then it might also introduce a little more character. It was hard to know if it was the play or the cast that prevented me from connecting with the characters on a level beyond smug satire. Corden does a good job evoking sympathy for poor, bewildered Ivan, but then he’s cut off by a throwaway meta line from Serge: “Could we try to steer clear of pathos?” This precedes a comic bit straight out of Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy (the human becoming mechanical) in which the men sullenly eat olives and drop the pits into a metal bowl that goes, ping, with metronomic regularity.

Never having seen Art during its original 18-month run, I wasn’t prepared for how much the material would remind me of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The play and TV shows both orbit around conceited, bougie friends’ repetitive needling and nitpicking, petty differences that spin out into shouting matches. Both are comedies of bad manners with gags based on triggering language: Serge goes into paroxysms of rage when anyone calls the painting “white.” I assume that back in Paris, Reza was more conversant with Georges Feydeau than Larry David (the final episode of Seinfeld aired two months after Art opened). I almost started mentally replacing Serge with George, Marc with Jerry and so forth. Truth is, David and his collaborators created wildly cranky solipsists, but I can spend hours enjoying them. For much less money.

Art | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Music Box Theatre | 239 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Click Here For Tickets

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Awkwardly Eurocentric to say about a work steeped in Yoruba religion, but The Brothers Size got me thinking of medieval philosophy. The prologue juxtaposes car mechanic Ogun Size (André Holland), up early and working hard in the driveway, and his kid sibling Oshoosi (Alani iLongwe), lying in bed, dreaming. Right off, Tarell Alvin McCraney draws the ancient distinction between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa: the active versus contemplative life. Given that McCraney chooses names of Yoruba gods, there’s also a touch of the mystery play here: humans reenacting divine narratives.

Not to overload references, but we’re also in the realm of American drama that maps the mythic to ordinary lives; see Thornton Wilder’s village metaphysics in Our Town or Tony Kushner’s seraphic heralds visiting AIDS patients. The Brothers Size may be more modest in scale—it was developed and presented 20 years ago when the author was in graduate school—but the tale remains quite moving, especially in this muscular, musical remount. Since I first caught the play as part of a trilogy called The Brother/Sister Plays at the Public Theater in 2009, I’ve admired McCraney’s heart-forward vision (he also cowrote the screenplay for Moonlight). This revival originated last year at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, where the playwright is artistic director.

A fable of family loyalty and freedom with queer undertones, the play is written with a keen sense of ritual that abstracts the (modern-ish) details of its characters’ lives. The stage is bare but for a circle of white sand that the trickster Elegba (Malcolm Mays) pours around the periphery. From the outset, this magical O binds the brothers in their complex love-hate rivalry. Ogun is forever reminding Oshoosi of his recent stint in prison, displaying bitter disappointment and his sacrifice. Oshoosi finds Ogun’s work deadening and humiliating, and resents the constant criticism. Elegba drops in on the brothers now and then; he was in prison with Oshoosi, and it’s strongly implied they were lovers while incarcerated.

McCraney’s world is wondrously fluid and porous; the “real” world melts into dream zones within seconds, as both brothers experience disturbing dreams about their fraying bonds. Actually, it’s not entirely a story of breakup; the arc shows how lives intertwined since the early death of their mother can practice devotion by letting go. In the script, characters narrate their actions along with their dialogue, dissolving barriers between performers and audience. Just as we’re constantly passing our molecules through each other, the characters’ inner and outer worlds are always in flux:

OGUN SIZE
Ogun Size Enters
Osi!
Calling for his brother
Osi…
Oshoosi Size!

OGUN SIZE
Waking up, coming in
Og man
Why you calling?

Mirroring the spoken stage directions, the actors swirl in a constant state of movement, co-directed by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani, choreographed by Juel D. Lane, and accompanied by percussionist Munir Zakee, who juggles an array of pulse-raising instruments. Holland, a magnificent presence who evokes deep sympathy, whose velvety voice caresses the ear, takes on a harder shell as the frustrated Ogun. (Having played Elegba in 2009, Holland knows his way around its lyric shimmies.) As restless Oshoosi, Ilongwe has a bratty yet yearning charisma; he’s a wounded prince on a quest for his true self. Mays ties it all together as sexy and dangerous Elegba, the catalyst who tempts Oshoosi and makes him newly vulnerable to racist cops.

If you set aside the Yoruba cosmology aspect of The Brothers Size, the 90-minute work doesn’t necessarily rewrite domestic or social drama. Two Black, working-class men orphaned at an early age in a semi-real Louisiana have grown apart but ultimately achieve a kind of union. It’s the ‘how’ of McCraney’s art that elevates the tropes into a poetic symphony of near-tragedy and spiritual release. Along with my pompous medieval musings above, I remembered that, during the pandemic, we longed for theater that was communal, primal, plugging into our shared humanity. I’m grateful to McCraney and his fellow artists for answering that prayer.

The Brothers Size | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | The Shed | 212-967-7555 | Click Here For Tickets

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We live in interesting cultural times. Institutions face existential challenges: private donations and foundation grants dwindling, graying arts patrons and younger audiences who’d rather look at their phones than dance or opera. Then you’ve got the politicians who want to police content and use places like the Kennedy Center for propaganda, not excellence. What to do? Bring a friend to one of these events. Show them the work is relevant and accessible. Maybe by demystifying “highbrow” forms, we can protect them from being co-opted by ideologues.

In opera

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Metropolitan Opera 

September 21 – October 11

The Metropolitan Opera has been home to gods, dragons and demons, but never the modern superhero. Until now. Composer Mason Bates and librettist Gene Scheer have adapted Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel about the fictional creators of a Golden Age comic book icon. Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts from the pit. A story of Jewish immigrants during World War II, the overarching theme is escapism—from fascism and the bleakness of life.

Sibyl at Powerhouse International Festival

October 8-11

This multimedia chamber opera features characteristically whimsical design by director William Kentridge, the South African surrealist who often uses stop motion, silhouette and collage. The subject of the piece, which has a percussive, chanting score by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, is the Apollonian female prophet. This limited engagement is just one of about a dozen dances and theatrical pieces from around the world at Powerhouse in Gowanus.

A Black Masque at the Frick’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium

November 2

Acclaimed bass-baritone Davóne Tines joins the Frick Collection’s resident string quartet, Sonnambula, for a concert deconstruction of Ben Jonson’s 1605 court entertainment, Masque of Blackness. Contrasting extant music with excerpts from West African griot sagas, the piece exposes and critiques British colonial anxieties about Blackness and purity.

Madam at Gallery Particulier, Brooklyn

November 7-11

Not all opera happens in the concert hall. Take a trip to Brooklyn’s Gallery Particulier for Killer Queen Opera’s immersive event. This story focuses on Russian Jewish immigrant Polly Adler, who ran a string of brothels in Manhattan during the Roaring Twenties. Composer Felix Jarrar and librettist Bea Goodwin explore this iconic sex worker and entrepreneur, played by soprano and director Karina Camille Parker.

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions at the Park Avenue Armory 

December 2-14

Bet that title got your attention! British composer Philip Venables and librettist Ted Huffman, who created a searing adaptation of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, turn to Larry Mitchell’s 1977 allegory-manifesto about queer liberation from patriarchy. A gleeful, anarchic patchwork for fifteen performers who sing, declaim and play instruments, this episodic piece blurs the lines between opera, cabaret and LGBTQ+ rally.

Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Newhouse Theater

December 16 – January 4

Once upon a time, Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday opera was a cultural watershed. Created for television and seen by an estimated five million NBC viewers in 1951, the hour-long piece gives a fictional but faithful spin to the Nativity story. For this intimate live version, superstar mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato heads the cast, directed by Kenny Leon.

In dance

Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory

September 9-20

Trajal Harrell unveils an ambitious “stadium runway” dance that combines a few of the choreographer’s obsessions: dancing on a surface with Piet Mondrian color planes, the body language of runway models and NYC’s queer voguing scene. There’s an implicit celebration of democracy and diversity in the large cast of dancers and actors, who wear more than sixty virtuosic looks designed by Harrell.

Larsen C at Powerhouse International Festival

October 16-18

How can a group of dancers represent a melting glacier? Greek dancemaker Christos Papadopoulos, in his American debut, shows us. The five-dancer piece takes its name from the Antarctic ice shelf that broke away in 2017, which currently measures 26,000 square miles. Papadopoulos uses movement (to music by Giorgos Poulios) to create a sense of drifting, melting and nature’s resilience.

Of Dishes and Dreams at the Baryshnikov Arts Center

October 16-18

A world premiere commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts, this evening-length piece by Keerati Jinakunwiphat sprang from growing up in a family-run Thai restaurant. Close quarters, repetitive movement, lots of fast entrances and exits and breakable objects—sounds like perfect material for a dance. Jinakunwiphat says she’s interested in “service, synergy and the balance between order and chaos.”

Turn it Out with Tiler Peck & Friends at New York City Center

October 16-19

Principal dancer of NYC Ballet and Instagram star Tiler Peck brings her dance showcase home after earning raves at Sadler’s Wells in London. The sparky, perky Peck partners with Chun Wai Chan, Michelle Dorrance, Lex Ishimoto, Brooklyn Mack, Mira Nadon and others, in works by Peck, Dorrance, Jillian Meyers, Alonzo King and William Forsythe.

Martha@BAM—The 1963 Interview at BAM Fisher

October 28 – November 1

Incarnating the regal Martha Graham herself, choreographer Richard Move combines theater, documentary and dance to recreate a 1963 interview at the 92nd Street Y in which Graham walks the audience through her methods and oeuvre. Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Lisa Kron plays critic Walter Terry, probing the classic Graham use of contraction, release and spiraling.

Gallim: Mother at the Joyce Theater

November 5-9

Andrea Miller’s Brooklyn-based troupe presents the world premiere of a primeval dance about the gestation of life. This choreographed fable seeks to physicalize our biological beginnings, a fleshly genesis of sorts. The EDM score is by Frédéric Despierre and Orly Anan crafts atavistic costumes for Miller’s always fierce, expressive performers.

In July, there was a wave of outrage when season lineups from some major New York companies dropped. Programming this fall is weirdly heavy on male playwrights and directors. It’s one thing for a toxic, reactionary White House to try to roll back feminism, but the arts are expected to push forward and hold up women. With that in mind, I’m not just short-listing major Broadway shows (none, note, by authors of color), daring plays and musicals Off but also work by women artists I’m excited to see.

The Essentialisn’t at HERE Arts Center

September 10-28

A beloved writer (she co-wrote the Warriors concept album with Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Obie-winning actor (Passing Strange), the dazzling Eisa Davis returns to the stage for a performance-art piece about Black womanhood and theatrical exposure. Turning HERE into an immersive art gallery, Davis asks: Is there an essential self that survives the spotlight?

The Other Americans at the Public Theater

September 11 – October 12

Legendary writer-performer John Leguizamo takes us back to the 1990s to explore the family dynamics of a Colombian-American household in Queens. Leguizamo plays Nelson Castro, a laundromat mogul whose son has returned from a mental-wellness facility. The lies upon which Castro’s family and business are built start to unravel. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs.

Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre

Previews September 13; opens September 28

Superfan of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Never saw this absurdist drama by Samuel Beckett? Let those worlds collide. Director Jamie Lloyd (Sunset Boulevard) trains his brutalist x-ray vision on the 20th-century classic about two vagrants, a dead tree and a whole lot of waiting…by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. Incidentally, there’s a Beckett trifecta this fall, with Endgame presented by Druid at the Irish Arts Center (October 22–November 23) and Stephen Rea pratfalling down memory lane in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Skirball (October 8–19).

The Maenads at the Tank

September 18 – October 12

Five dudes climb a mountain to cosplay an ancient Greek Dionysiac ritual. They assume the personae of maenads, or female worshippers of the god of wine and drama, to exorcise their problematic masculinity. Deprived of cell reception, food, water and high on drugs, comic chaos ensues. Stephen Foglia’s comic thriller gets its world premiere at the Tank.

WEER at the Cherry Lane Theatre

September 20 – November 9

If you streamed Natalie Palamides’s Nate on Netflix (highly recommended), you know what a gender-fluid chameleon she is. Now the L.A. clown plays both sides of a relationship we follow over three years, starting on New Year’s Eve, 1999. How can one performer play a man and a woman at the same time? “Mark” is costumed and made up on half her body, “Christina” on the other. Palamides should be flipping brilliant at the Cherry Lane, recently acquired by A24 Films.

Ragtime at the Vivian Beaumont Theater

Previews September 26; opens October 16

Director Lear DeBessonet has recently taken over at Lincoln Center Theater, and one of her first acts as artistic director is to remount the beloved Stephen Flaherty/Lynn Ahrens musical based on the E.L. Doctorow novel about America at the turn of the 20th Century when hopeful immigrants sailed straight into the rocky realities of New York City circa 1920. A century ago, America was a different place in many ways, but corruption and prejudice have always danced to a jaunty rhythm on the piano.

Oratorio for Living Things at the Pershing Square Signature Center

September 30 – November 16

Returning after a 2022 run at Ars Nova, musical sorceress Heather Christian and director Lee Sunday Evans celebrate the mystery of life on earth through the ancient form of oratorio. Usually extolling sacred or mythical subjects, Christian takes the classical genre and infuses it with jazz, blues, soul and gospel. Her free-associative sung text is likewise wide-ranging—from the cosmic to the everyday.

Little Bear Ridge Road at the Booth Theatre

Previews October 7; opens October 30

While he’s been produced Off Broadway for years (recently with Grangeville), playwright Samuel D. Hunter finally makes his Broadway debut with this story of an acid-tongued aunt and her estranged nephew, who has returned to small-town Idaho to sell his late father’s house. Originally presented at Steppenwolf in Chicago, the play transfers with cast intact: the always stunning Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock, who reportedly holds his own.

Liberation at the James Earl Jones Theatre

Previews October 8; opens October 28

If you missed Bess Wohl’s wistful and heart-rending study of women learning the joy and cost of freedom last year Off Broadway, good news. This transfer from the Roundabout Theatre Company retains its top-shelf cast, led by a sensational Susannah Flood as a woman channeling her mother, who started a feminist consciousness-raising group in the 1970s. Whitney White directs the superb ensemble, which bares body and soul.

The Queen of Versailles at the St. James Theatre

Previews October 8; opens November 9

More than 20 years after Wicked opened on Broadway, Kristin Chenoweth reunites with composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz to play a different sort of princess. Based on the documentary about a timeshare billionaire and his wife who lost a fortune in the 2008 crash, the musical is a tale of riches to rags and the reality-warping power of wealth. As for the title? Refers to the couple’s 90,000-square-foot mansion inspired by the French megapalace. F. Murray Abraham shares the stage with the divine Chenoweth.

Chess at the Imperial Theatre

Previews October 15; opens November 16

The cult 1988 pop musical by ABBA tunesters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus gets its first Broadway revival with a dishy cast headed by Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele and Nicholas Christopher. Michele (following her blockbuster run in Funny Girl) plays a Hungarian woman caught between a Soviet chess master (Christopher) and a cynical, short-tempered American (Tveit). Cold war politics and hot international romance ensue.

The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire at the Vineyard Theater

October 23 – November 30

A new piece by Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play) always promises theatrical magic. Moody, brilliant and formally bold, her plays are eerie and riotously funny at the same time. Burning Cauldron follows a northern California “intentional community” (don’t say cult) whose faith in the land and nature is tested following a sudden death. Steve Cosson directs the world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre.

Meet the Cartozians at Second Stage Theater

October 29 – December 7

Andrea Martin gets to draw upon her Armenian-American heritage for Talene Monahan’s new comedy, set in the 1920s and a century later. In the earlier period, an Armenian immigrant fights for legal recognition. On the contemporary side, the man’s descendants are, shall we say, a bit more superficial in their goals, which run to social media and cosmetic enhancements. David Cromer directs the ethnic satire by a whip-smart rising writer.

Practice at Playwrights Horizons

October 30 – December 7

Last season, Nazareth Hassan’s Bowl EP was a sneaky delight at the Vineyard, a queer rom-com between skateboarders with trippy supernatural twists. Now Hassan turns their talent to theater itself, as we follow a company of actors in Brooklyn dominated by a charismatic director. Calling it a “shapeshifting psycho-comedy,” Hassan ponders what it means to belong.

Oedipus at Studio 54

Previews October 30; opens November 13

Ambitious writer-director Robert Icke is a house-flipper of classic literature. He takes Greek tragedy, Ibsen, Arthur Schnitzler, you name it, gives the script a top-down rewrite, then stages it as a contemporary tale with slick design. His gut renovation of Sophocles’ tale of a king who murdered his father and married his mother—by accident!—becomes a modern political drama starring Mark Strong and Leslie Manville.

Burnt Toast at the Skirball Center for the Arts

November 5-8

Norwegian performance group Susie Wang makes its American debut at the Skirball, currently bringing the best international work to NYC. Absurdist and noirish, the piece has gotten raves for bloody intensity and weirdness, as well as comparisons to Kubrick and David Lynch. A plush hotel lobby with functional elevators becomes the primal scene of cannibalism and other horrors.

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In the Public Theater’s latest Central Park offering, a foreigner survives a shipwreck to become a desperate immigrant on a strange shore. Exploiting gender ambiguity, she insinuates herself into the local oligarch’s business—i.e., steals a job from a real citizen. And that’s the hero of this so-called comedy! If our Pumpkin-in-Chief digs his tiny claws any further into culture, such a work has zero chance of playing the Kennedy Center. But honestly, who cares? Twelfth Night already has a delightful home at the refurbished Delacorte Theater, where all may resume their love affair with free summer Shakespeare.

Director Saheem Ali literally spells out his approach to the Bard’s giddiest romantic comedy. Spanning the stage are 13-foot-high, shiny red letters reading ‘what you will,’ the play’s subtitle. Scenic designer Maruti Evans takes his cue from Robert Indiana’s iconic 1970 Love sculpture (at Rockefeller Center) down to the Didone-ish serif font. “What You Will,” of course, denotes both audience taste and longings of the persons of the play. Those familiar with the beloved farce might also reflect that reading and textuality—twisting words for the desired sense—are central: the plot turns on forged, cryptic missives, twins (human homonyms) and characters misinterpreting each other’s looks and utterances. Actors enter and exit through and around the giant characters, use smaller letters to conceal themselves and, finally, roll them around to reveal glitzy strobing bulbs for a fabulous Drag Race finale.

Clocking at under two hours with no intermission, this is a brisk, sleek and joyful Twelfth Night, measuring up to the last one at the Delacorte—the storybook 2009 version that starred Raúl Esparza, Audra McDonald and an ardent Anne Hathaway in pageboy drag. Taking the role of cross-dressing-for-survival Viola is the radiant and ever-charming Lupita Nyong’o. Her Viola has ample pluck and wistfulness to win our hearts. In a casting stunt that pays off, her brother, Junior Nyong’o, plays Viola’s twin Sebastian, separated from her by a shipwreck before the action of the play. Both wash up on the shores of Illyria, where Viola becomes servant boy to Duke Orsino (Khris Davis), a musclebound bro relentlessly courting the beauteous Olivia (Sandra Oh). For her part, the imperious Olivia has been in mourning for her brother and has no eyes for Orsino. But she does fall hard for thirst trap Caesario, as Viola has disguised herself.

As the requisite clowns, there’s Olivia’s boozing uncle, Sir Toby Belch (John Ellison Conlee), friend and mooch to Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a dolt who fancies himself a player. Running interference between Belch and her boss, Olivia, is Maria (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Feste (Moses Sumney), the play’s melancholy fool, comes and goes strumming a guitar and showing off a delicate falsetto. Finally, Twelfth Night’s sour clown and the closest it gets to a villain is Malvolio (Peter Dinklage), Olivia’s puritanical head servant. Secretly lusting for his mistress and the power a marriage would give him; the snobby groom gets his comeuppance with a fake billet-doux penned by Maria.

The blue-chip ensemble seems to be having a blast, even with some odd acting choices. In Malvolio’s early scenes, Dinklage adopts a nasal, strangulated voice and stiff movements, as if to underscore Malvolio’s performative servility for Olivia. Luckily, as the character gets lost in his delusions of advancement and then abused by Belch and Feste, Dinklage’s vocal mannerisms fade. The Game of Thrones veteran’s a natural comedian, of course, dryly witty with a killer deadpan. And he has costuming to help (by Oana Botez): the infamous yellow stockings, rendered here as mustard-colored thigh-high boots.

Several of the production’s slyer details spring from the design. When Aguecheek threatens to leave Illyria because his wooing of Olivia has utterly failed, Ferguson enters pulling a luggage cart laden with dozens of suitcases and boxes, atop which is perched a stuffed raccoon. It’s a cute plush version of actual Delacorte mascot Romeo the Raccoon, who showed up the night I attended, traversing the wall behind the audience minutes before showtime.

There’s not a dud in the ensemble, from Sandra Oh’s flushed and impulsive Olivia to a scene-stealing turn by initialized performer “b” as Antonio, the sailor who rescues Sebastian from drowning, only to be capsized by mad devotion to him. In their few scenes, b’s Antonio arcs from swaggering and puckish to bitterly betrayed and finally pitiable. There aren’t many Twelfth Nights you leave wishing someone would write a sequel just for the heartbroken mariner. Maybe he hooks up with scorned Malvolio: happy endings all around.

These comedies are intrinsically musical, peppered with songs of the time. Accordingly, composer Michael Thurber’s vibrant, polyglot score excels, with pieces for an all-women string quartet, a jazzy art song for Sumney and even a burst of Elizabethan rap for Viola. In addition to the natural musicality of Shakespeare’s verse, we also hear bewitching fragments of Swahili (translated from the source) when Viola and Sebastian fall back into their native tongue. Dialect coach Karishma Bhagani and the Nyong’o siblings weave these lilting, wonderful notes into a swoon-worthy night’s symphony.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will | 2hrs. No intermission. | Delacorte Theater, Central Park | 212-967-7555 | How to Get Free Tickets 

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The ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia! opened barely a month after the horrors of September 11, and many New Yorkers seemed to need it. A fizzy rom-com set on a Greek island promising sun, sex and famous Swedish bops, the show found a teary-eyed Broadway with arms and hearts wide open. Not me. Back then, I sneered at this “distressingly ersatz…karaoke party pretending to be a musical.” My surging bile overflowed onto the audience, those “boomer patrons soul-training down the aisles, shaking their arm wattles to the beat of ‘Dancing Queen.’” Guess I was determined to be the London transfer’s Waterloo, so to speak.

Twenty-four years and many more pounds later, how’s my underarm adipose? Reader, it jiggles. What about my feelings? Have they softened toward this global phenomenon, seen by seventy million people worldwide, translated into sixteen languages and apparently unable to besmirch Meryl Streep’s career? Still not a fan.

Pretty much the version I originally scowled through, this touring production of Mamma Mia! proves the material will not age; it still has the emotional depth of a sugared-up fourteen-year-old. The opening scene is a squeal-fest between three young women, followed later by a scream-fest between three reunited middle-aged friends. Between waves of shrieking, there are ABBA songs. The farcical tale hinges on a plot hatched by Sophie Sheridan (Amy Weaver), daughter of Donna (Christine Sherrill), the American proprietor of a scruffy taverna on a Greek island. Sophie never knew her father, but after stealing her mother’s diary (boundaries!), she discovers that around the time of her conception, Donna impulsively slept with three men. Forging her mother’s hand (more boundaries!) Sophie invites the spermatic trio to her wedding to bland finance bro Sky (Grant Reynolds), hoping one will walk her down the aisle. I assume it’s called Mamma Mia! because Mamma Was a Big Ol’ Slut wouldn’t fit on the marquee.

The story being set on a Greek island, it really ought to end in an orgy of cathartic violence and the sacrifice of a few goats, but instead we get a lot of PG-13 smut, slapstick and dance choreographed to disco-era earworms “Dancing Queen,” “Money, Money, Money,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and nineteen others (I counted; I recounted). The title track arrives when Donna is confronted by former lovers Harry (Rob Marnell), Bill (Jim Newman) and Sam (Victor Wallace) and spirals into a psychic meltdown with such penetrating insights such as, “Mamma mia, now I really know / My, my, I should not have let you go.” Eat your heart out, “Rose’s Turn.” To be fair, there is an 11 o’clock number for Donna, “The Winner Takes It All,” when Donna realizes that she let true love (Sam) slip through her fingers. Sherrill, raw and vulnerable in a black slip in her bedroom, belts the number with operatic fervor, clearly making a play for the bus-and-truck of Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard.

Revived—or perhaps re-embalmed—by original director Phyllida Lloyd with the dated book by Catherine Johnson (Donna’s on e-mail!), the design includes noticeably garish and aggressive sound by Andrew Bruce and Bobby Aiken, cheapish sets and costumes by Mark Thompson and a cast that does its best in the absence of subtlety or much chemistry. Sherrill is giving Jean Smart. Marnell’s British accent is tin-eared. The actors playing Sophie’s “dads” have opportunities for goofy charm, but they never get beyond cringeworthy competence. As singers from Donna’s former days in a girl group, Carly Sakolove and Jalynn Steele ham it up mightily as the female tummler and glam diva, respectively. Choreographer Anthony Van Laast serves regular courses of beefcake and cheesecake from the young and fit ensemble.

Historically, Mamma Mia! was a breakthrough moment for the jukebox musical. In its wake came numerous flops based on the songbooks of the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, John Lennon and many others. There have been successes, some worth praise: Jersey Boys and Beautiful—The Carole King Story come to mind. Today, the genre is well-established on Broadway with & Juliet, Just in Time, MJ: The Michael Jackson Musical and Moulin Rouge! The Musical. What’s there to say about the mother of them all? She delivers the fan service hard. Do I wish producers had updated the book? Hired a new director who could inject subtlety and sexual frankness, toned down the wink-wink hysteria? Yup. But you have to remember this show originated in the West End; it’s just one of England’s many crimes against musical theater. Anyway, why tinker with a formula that paid off? Mamma Mia! lasted 14 years on Broadway, no doubt rescuing ABBA songsmiths Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus from abject penury. The current victory lap continues through February. I suppose it’s cheaper than a trip to Santorini.

Mamma Mia! | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | Winter Garden Theatre | 1634 Broadway | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here

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I imagine being a high schooler today must be hell: the self-esteem drain from social media, the pressures of gender identity, pretending to like Taylor Swift. Then I remember the late ’80s, when my peers and I survived our own preppies vs. stoners teenage inferno. At least I wasn’t a cool kid or jock in danger of being whacked by a snob-hating serial killer. That’s the black-comic premise of the 1989 satire Heathers, which gave a sick twist to John Hughes’ bittersweet coming-of-age formula. The cult movie was adapted into a clever high-energy 2014 musical, which returns to New World Stages looking superfine and hitting different. Heathers The Musical has become big-tent IP: bridging Gens X and Z in mutual loathing (and yes, longing) for those gorgeous color-coordinated goddesses who rule the hallways.

You’re acquainted with the Heathers, right? (Drop two letters and they’re haters.) In order of increasing mean-girlness, they are Heather McNamara (Elizabeth Teether), a secretly insecure cheerleader; Heather Duke (Olivia Hardy) the quiet seething beta waiting for her chance; and Heather Chandler (McKenzie Kurtz), a gleeful sadist and “mythic bitch,” per hero-narrator Veronica (Lorna Courtney). Veronica is empathetic and artsy, eager to graduate and get away to college. Though sensible, even she is not immune to the allure of popularity. In the first ten minutes, Veronica agrees to a makeover—the Heathers want to exploit her forgery skills—and becomes the fourth wheel. (In the movie, Winona Ryder’s Veronica was already a skeptical satellite of the triad.)

When Veronica witnesses the sardonic Baudelaire-quoting J.D. (Casey Likes) stand up to and beat homophobic jocks Kurt (Cade Ostermeyer) and Ramm (Xavier McKinnon), she’s fascinated and turned on. Later, at a party, when Veronica refuses to play a cruel prank on the overweight outcast Martha (Erin Morton) and drunkenly beds J.D., her fate is sealed. J.D., a sociopathic manipulator traumatized by a dead mother and psycho dad, coerces Veronica into ridding herself of these evil queens the easiest way possible: slipping the Heather Chandler Drano in a coffee mug. Faster than you can say, “fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Veronica ambivalently accepts her role as shoulder-padded Mrs. Lovett to J.D.’s trench-coated Sweeney Todd.

In the eleven years since it ran Off Broadway, the musical has evolved, and so has the target audience. A slightly retooled version opened in London in 2018, selling out and moving to the West End and touring the U.K. The current production (directed, like the New York and London incarnations, by Andy Fickman) has been extended through January. Already, the crowds for previews (at least the one I attended) are treating Heathers like a long-running smash. No surprise, really. With a couple of cast albums out there, the bright and bouncy retro pop score by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe has inspired countless TikTok reenactments. There’s a built-in fandom for the material which, after all, shares tropes with titles as diverse as Wicked, Dear Evan Hansen and Hairspray. The ridiculously stacked cast even includes an alum from the Hairspray OBC: adorable Kerry Butler as a media-hungry school counselor who gloms onto the rash of “suicides” plaguing Westerberg High.

Jokes about suicide? Football dads coming out at their sons’ funeral? A show that opens with students singing a barrage of hate speech: “Freak! Slut! Cripple! Homo!” Satire is not easy to pull off in the current climate; how has this show not been canceled? Perhaps we’re ready to accept that representation is not endorsement. Folks around me roared with joy when the Heathers made their first entrance in a blaze of light. I thought, “You do know they’re the villains, right?” You could argue that years of social media have instilled a greater degree of fame-hunger—maybe also pop conformity—to younger consumers. I get that 26 years after Columbine and with school shootings practically normalized, a gun-toting edgelord like J.D. is impossible to root for, but are narcissistic princesses the alternative? Is it that everyone wants to be an influencer with a million followers?

Perhaps I’m looking at it wrong. The musical, like the movie, advocates kindness and self-acceptance—virtues even the Heathers secretly yearn for despite their status addiction. Perhaps Gen Z is nimble enough to idolize the bitchy trendsetters while at the same time knowing it’s all performative: a person can be Mean Girl and Meek Misfit simultaneously. Kids these days: They contain multitudes… of Instagram filters.

What marks the movie (screenplay by Daniel Waters) as a Gen X icon is its reflexive “plague on both your houses” pessimism. We are the middle-child generation, keenly aware that everything’s an act and the world doesn’t want us. Veronica finds herself trapped between the toxic vanity of the in-crowd and the homicidal insanity of the anarchist. She rejects both. In that sense, perhaps, Gen X and Z share a sardonic-outsider POV.

Beyond its sociological themes, Heathers is a ton of stylish, well-crafted fun with top-notch acting and top-to-bottom earworms. After intermission, the score grows darker and introspective, giving individual characters moments to unburden their hearts. Heather McNamara sings a haunting ditty about the survival game that is high school in Lifeboat, and Martha gets a pathetic Disney-princess “I Want” number at her lowest ebb, Kindergarten Boyfriend. The high-octane banger Candy Store lets the Heathers strut and tease, and there’s my favorite, the wistful Seventeen, a rock ballad about feeling nostalgia for a youth that’s slipping away. David Shields’s dazzling jewel-toned couture and Ben Cracknell’s adrenaline-pumping lights make the show the ocular equivalent of a 7-Eleven Slurpee referenced by J.D. in his ode to numbing the pain: “When the voice in your head / Says you’re better off dead, / Don’t open a vein / Just freeze your brain.” Neat thing about Heathers: it may appear to be coldhearted and ice-blooded, but by the end, there’s a thaw and everyone is part of the club.

Heathers | 2 hrs. 20 mins. One intermission. | New World Stages | 340 West 50th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here

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For all the sensory stimuli enveloping audiences at Punchdrunk’s latest immersion, Viola’s Room, the most mysterious to me was smell. What exactly was that scent hanging about as we carefully trod from bedroom to shadowy maze and dining hall and chapel? It wasn’t acrid or foul; there was a whiff of stale incense or burnt soil; it clung to the white Victorian shifts hung from rafters that we wove around. At times, you detected a grassy sub-aroma—perhaps the foot sanitizer we applied before embarking on this hourlong jaunt. Whatever way Punchdrunk’s ace technicians fashioned the olfactory effect, it blends perfectly with the countless aural, visual and tactile pleasures to be had. All of which almost makes up for a certain intellectual lack in the narrative component.

Conceived and directed by Punchdrunk chief wizard Felix Barrett—also the main force behind the long-running Sleep No More—Viola’s Room is an audio-guided indoor son et lumière. Historically, that 20th-century genre takes place al fresco at iconic buildings, but this fairytale about a girl’s mystical coming of age encourages viewers to delve inwards, not out. After six audience members (at a time) have bagged their phones, shucked their shoes and sanitized their soles, they enter a teenage girl’s realistically appointed bedroom, circa 1996. A poster for The Craft hangs on a wall; on a bedside table sits Christopher Pike’s novel Vampire and an ink drawing of an owl; a print of Evelyn De Morgan’s 1898 pre-Raphaelite painting Helen of Troy is taped to the wall. Heavy goth-girl vibes. We’re wearing headphones, through which we hear a clip of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” then narration purred plummily by unofficial English monarch Helena Bonham Carter. When HRH HBC tells you to get on all fours and follow the light, you drop. Expect your pulse to jump when she gasps, “Run. Quickly!”

SEE ALSO: A Hot Mess and a Sex Pest Go on a Date in ‘Lowcountry’

We crawl through a gauzy tent in one corner of the bedroom and find ourselves exploring a series of dim corridors and rooms that grow increasingly strange and seemingly haunted. We’ll return to iterations of the bedroom as the show progresses, as it symbolizes Viola’s journey to a new self and, possibly, abduction by the Devil. The text that Carter whispers in our ear was written by Daisy Johnson, an adaptation of Barry Pain’s 1901 story “The Moon-Slave.” The tale concerns one Princess Viola, married off to a boy named Hugo, who becomes obsessed with her silk dancing shoes, has an epiphany in a maze with an enchanted tree and then succumbs to some occult manifestation.

The fragmentary bits on the headphones and the live images don’t really cohere into a story, which is fine: we’re in fever-dream mode. But you do wish the Johnson text were a bit more lyrical or filled in Viola’s character, creating a richer hero to root for. Still, there’s no shortage of options for your attention. We walk along narrowing muslin hallways, lit by powder-puff balls illuminated from within. (“[H]er dreams,” Carter tells us, “were dashing things, tangled as a ball of wool, sometimes pressing out into the light so it was difficult to tell what exactly was real.”) More than 1,500 individual light fixtures and over 2,000 light cues keep you from languishing too long in complete darkness, although there are total blackouts for brief meditation. Beneath our bare feet, we feel cloth, wood, artificial grass, dirt and sand (you find your toes dusted with black powder upon exiting). There’s a particularly ominous bit in a chapel with a religious reveal I’ll keep to myself. Ballerina toe shoes recur throughout the environment, and a whole tree festooned with them is one of the show’s several coups de théâtre. Casey Jay Andrews’s awe-inspiring scenic design, Simon Wilkinson’s ingenious lighting and Gareth Fry’s spooky binaural sound sprout whole worlds in the 12,500 square feet of The Shed’s Level 4 gallery.

As noted, the story is the least interesting element, a YA horror-romantasy scored with pop clips (Tori Amos, Smashing Pumpkins) and classical bits (Mozart, Penderecki). Personally, I’d prefer good poetry fed into my ear holes. But that might alienate Punchdrunk’s target audience, which I suspect is young. Or stoned. Or young and stoned. Happily, no stimulants are needed to enhance this chiaroscuro phantasmagoria, which induces a state of childhood wonder, fleeing the darkness and chasing the light.

Viola’s Room | 1hr. No intermission. | The Shed | 545 West 30th Street | hello@theshed.org or 646-455-3494 | Tickets Here

Because the mind of the theater critic is a dimly lit basement crammed with boxes labeled after plays, actors and genres, the title of Abby Rosebrock’s Lowcountry made me think of Bruce Norris’s Downstate from three seasons ago. The earlier piece, like Rosebrock’s, is about registered sex offenders in abject spatial and spiritual limbo, waiting for deliverance by forgiveness or death. Both plays are less concerned with passing judgment than examining shame and social pathologies around sexuality. I bring up Norris not to imply dramaturgical copycatting. In fact, Rosebrock’s irreverent, even horny comedy goes places that Downstate doesn’t dare, though it’s oddly structured.

Produced by the Atlantic Theater Company and capably staged—up to a point—by Jo Bonney, Lowcountry is a sweaty two-person dance sandwiched between a draggy expository phone call and a quickie twist ending. If you arrived late and left five minutes early, you might say it crackles along in a prickly, noirish vein. Taken as a whole, the drama leaves you hanging.

A first date that goes right yet horribly wrong, the real-time action happens in the studio apartment of David (Babak Tafti), a recently divorced ex-high-school basketball coach in the sleepy lake town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina. There’s an unmade pull-out bed, sadly partitioned by a gray curtain that keeps falling down—depressing interiors courtesy of Arnulfo Maldonado. Through an overlong phone conversation with his gruff, casually abusive sponsor, Paul (Keith Kupferer, on speaker), we discover that David is close to gaining joint custody of his son. More sinisterly, we learn at some point he wore an ankle monitor and, at present, he’s lying to Paul about walking to a park for an outdoor date. In reality, he’s making spaghetti dinner for a woman he met on Tinder. There’s an edge of suspicion in Paul’s voice. David is broken goods. What’s the nature of the damage?

That we learn in greater detail over an hour or so of flirting and banter once Tally (Jodi Balfour) arrives. Sheathed in a skimpy teal number and wearing two-inch chunky heels that give her height and a baby-doe strut, Balfour (Apple TV+’s For All Mankind) crafts a richly embodied, sensual performance. (Costume designer Sarah Laux captures the characters’ suburban-mall couture.) A former ballerina, the actor knows how to give weight to a partner or spin off on her own psychological pirouettes. If Tally had googled David (as other women have), she might have learned of his shady past with a girl he coached on a team. If David had a better memory, he’d realize he went to school with Tally (she was heavier then). Both characters have secrets, but Tally is on a mission, telegraphed with her throwaway remark, “Ovulating really hard right now.” A red flag to match the third glass of screw-top red she gulps down.

Having seen Rosebrock’s Blue Ridge in 2019 (also at the Atlantic), I’m impressed all over again by her flair for writing women who are smart, funny, self-critical and pissed off. In the earlier play, Marin Ireland blazed as a scandalized English teacher trying to change her ways at a Christian halfway house in the North Carolina mountains. Here, Balfour gets to be flighty and witty and bitter and self-mocking as a Moncks Corner native who fled to Los Angeles for acting, failed at that, and now gigs in copyediting. When David asks Tally what her purpose is in life, she shoots back, “[A]void homelessness.” When David asks about her faith, she blithely cracks, “I’m into religions, in general—I loathe reason, so…” And when David finally admits to being a sex offender, Tally doesn’t recoil in horror; she goes on a sociological rant:

We’re all things we don’t wanna be, and it’s fucked-up we live in a world, where we can’t admit being disgusting, and mentally ill and a hypocrite’s kind of the human condition, and rent-seeking parasites fuck us, routinely and PROFIT FROM TERMINAL ILLNESS, and MAKE PEOPLE HOMELESS—

In the less showy role—the straight man to the chaos agent, if you will—Tafti does solid work building up his defenses, then letting this relentless lady tear them down. Rosebrock stacks the odds in terms of David’s sympathy quotient when we learn the details of his transgression, which suggest confusion rather than predatory villainy.

Where the piece zig-zags not so satisfyingly, as noted, is the opening sequence and an overly rushed denouement. Respecting spoilers, but the voice we hear on the phone, Paul, is attached to a burly dude who inevitably shows up after an intimate exchange between the leads. It was foreshadowed: David is crashing in Paul’s apartment, and the sponsor has the keys. David alludes to Paul’s past as a serial patron of sex workers. Played by Kupferer, a Chicago stage veteran recently seen in the movie Ghostlight, Paul operates as an anti-deus-ex-machina, dropping by to create problems, not solve them. David and Tally may have skeletons in their closets, but Paul is the monster under the bed. Bonney directs the gory twist a bit too hurriedly (keep your eye on those chonky heels), as if she didn’t trust the audience to process it, and Rosebrock opts to leave us breathless. It’s like you’re on a date that’s awkward yet arousing, then someone goes to the restroom and doesn’t come back.

Lowcountry | 1hr 35mins. No intermission. | Atlantic Theater Company | 336 West 20th Street | Buy Tickets Here

Hugh Jackman: Do Stand So Close to Me. Not a rejected title for the Wolverine actor’s residency at Radio City Music Hall. One would be hard-pressed to get within screaming distance of the star at that airplane hangar. Any fan of the Police will clock my allusion their 1980 hit, about a schoolteacher tormented by an affair with a student. In Hannah Moscovitch’s engaging Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, Jackman does indeed play a professor entangled with a young woman enrolled in his lit class. Here’s the meta kicker, though: at the relatively teensy Minetta Lane Theatre, audiences can enjoy an intimate view of the Oz icon as he entertains 300-plus of us within leg-hugging distance. (Don’t hug his leg.)

After so many years shredding fasciae at the gym or scowling in front of green screens, Jackman must savor the chance to simply stroll onstage, not pause for an ovation, and act. His 11-month turn in The Music Man on Broadway notwithstanding, it’s a relief to see the gifted actor use his soothing voice and agile body in the service of nuanced, adult storytelling. Canadian writer Moscovitch has structured her two-hander (which premiered in Toronto in 2020) primarily as a monologue delivered by successful novelist Jon Macklem (Jackman), interspersed with dialogues between him and 19-year-old Annie (Ella Beatty). Over the course of 85 minutes, Jon recalls a chapter in his life when he was teaching at an unnamed college while separated from his third wife. He’s struggling with his latest book (lumberjacks at the turn of the century) when the image of girl wearing a red coat pops into his head; he realizes this is Annie, a moon-faced nymph in his class who, it turns out, is a fan.

First there’s a meet-weird on Jon’s front lawn as Annie interrupts his mowing of the grass with halting, elliptical small talk. Turns out her student housing is close enough to Jon’s house that he can see her window from his front porch (surely there’s a campus policy about that). Jon is charmed and perhaps a little annoyed by Annie’s spacey, deadpan speech, until she drops this confession: “I want the living version of the feeling I get when I read your work.” Speaking his love language—whether it’s a calculated seduction or simply the truth—Annie begins to chip away at the wall of propriety that Jon has maintained between himself and his students. 

That is, if we take him at word: He sees temptation, but has laughed it off in the past. Does Jackman play a reliable narrator? As Moscovitch’s story reveals itself as a series of authorial Russian dolls, we begin to question who’s telling this story, and whose story is being told. At first, we might assume that Jon is cannibalizing his experiences for fiction; he doesn’t describe his actions with “I did” but “he did,” as if shifting the voice to third person absolves him of responsibility for crossing an ethical line. His defining character trait is the desire to live a respectable, bourgeois life (hence the title) and not become a stereotypical reckless artist. 

Ian Rickson has directed Jackman before, notably in the atmospheric Jez Butterworth drama, The River on Broadway a decade ago, and he again brings out the movie star’s relaxed, natural charm and humor, in his native Aussie accent. Beatty has the harder task of bringing a naïve cipher to life, and her mannered deer-frozen-in-the-headlights affect can grow repetitive. Unless the character is medicated or neurodivergent or simply millennial, we could use more fleshing out from the playwright, or added quirk/warmth/slyness from the performer. The line-to-line writing is smart and self-aware, if also prone to purple passages—which we might blame on either Jon or Moscovitch. As they make love (a cruder expression is warranted) inside his parked car, Jon indulges in this sub-Rothian reflection: “Annie clutched him and the whole time she had dark life in her eyes—depth, depth—alongside a certain odd knowing look: the blankness was gone, and he suddenly wondered if that blankness had been…youth?” Blankness replaced by darkness: talk about an unsentimental education. 

In spite of the odd wince-inducing moments, the script moves fast and scores laughs, driven by genuine erotic heat between its attractive leads. The physical production looks tasteful and spare, with stylish wooden furnishings from Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones, flattering and oft-removed couture by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, and story-supporting lights and sound by Isabella Byrd and Mikaal Sulaiman. Sexual Misconduct runs in repertory with a new version of August Strindberg’s Creditors, also directed by Rickson, and also centered on the messy implosion of a relationship. Liev Schreiber and Maggie Siff star in that. Coproduced by Audible and the newly formed Together—a company that presents new work in intimate venues free of commercial expectations—the shows are drawing crowds, for obvious celebrity reasons. Let’s hope less famous names get the spotlight, once Jackman heads back to Radio City and the MCU.   

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes | 1hr 25mins. No intermission. | Minetta Lane Theatre | 18 Minetta Lane | Buy Tickets Here    

William Inge’s Bus Stop may be 70 years old, but its lovelorn and lusting characters invite present-day descriptors: gathered at a Kansas diner during a blizzard we encounter a sex pest and stalker, fuck buddies, a groomer, and possibly a closet case. (That last expression dates back to the 1940s.) Forgive my coarse slang; Inge’s assorted thirsters are much more polite—that is, repressed—about their hangups or vices. But however you classify these folks, a mostly outstanding cast brings them vibrantly to life in a respectful revival co-produced by Classic Stage Company, NAATCO, and Transport Group. 

If Inge’s language avoids vulgarity, he doesn’t hide his core subject: the myriad agonies that come with love and sex. Let us refer to the aforementioned labels and map them. Impetuous young cowboy Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen) lost his virginity to nightclub singer Cherie (Midori Francis), subsequently forced her on a bus and has been harassing her for more physical affection. As for NSA hookups, that’s bus driver Carl (David Shih) and salty, wisecracking waitress Grace (Cindy Cheung). The predator in question is Dr. Lyman (Rajesh Bose), an alcoholic ex-teacher who makes Shakespearean-scented overtures to Elma (Delphi Borich), a pretty waitress still in high school. Less explicitly defined is Virgil (Moses Villarama), Bo’s strong-but-silent buddy. Virgil may not be out, but the ranch hand’s giving Brokeback Mountain. Not getting mixed up in any hanky-panky is square but decent sheriff Will (David Lee Huynh), whose job is to keep these horny Kansans from running amok. 

Snowed in and waiting for a crew to clear the highway, Carl and his passengers pass the hours with their relationship dramas that simmer, explode, or overlap with others. Dr. Lyman spikes his lemon soda with whiskey while flirting with the oblivious and impressionable Elma. Carl and Grace contrive to meet in Grace’s adjoining apartment for a quickie. Cherie, suitcase stashed behind the counter, prays the bus will leave soon—without her aboard. The girl has essentially been kidnapped by Bo, determined to ferry her to a “God-forsaken ranch in Montana,” as she puts it. Prone to tantrums, the bullying Bo is kept barely in check by Virgil, his much more mature and level-headed friend. The tension of Bus Stop lies mainly in finding out if Inge will steer his group portrait toward tragedy or comedy. Will Bo and Cherie fight their way to true love? Will Dr. Lyman lure Elma into a tryst in Topeka? 

Frequently compared to his coeval Tennessee Williams—both premiered work on Broadway through the 1950s and ’60s—Inge (1913–1973) is widely regarded as the lesser writer. Certainly, his language lacks Williams’s flamboyant lyricism and his sexual frankness comes across as paler, primmer. When it opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, Bus Stop’s neighbor down 45th Street was the comparatively pornographic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Morosco. Both are stellar examples of midcentury American drama, but it’s the Williams that has gotten five revivals to Inge’s one (in 1996). Today, Inge remains the yellow-bellied western meadowlark to Williams’s pink flamingo. Even so, director Jack Cummings III’s scrupulously detailed, slow-burning production makes a sturdy case for revisiting Grace’s diner, especially in the close environs of Classic Stage Company.

Cummings’s strongest asset is a hugely appealing ensemble. Coinciding with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the production casts AAPI actors in roles they fit beautifully. With her blend of deadpan wit and world-weary grit, Cheung leaves nary a crumb as Grace, dispensing side-eye and side-of-mouth punch lines. Balancing Cheung’s one-liners, the sweet Borich infuses ingenue Elma with curiosity and kindness. Shih’s working-joe bus driver is a rumpled hoot and Huynh’s cop a beacon of dignity and tolerance. In a role that Marilyn Monroe hoped would prove her acting bona fides, Francis sports blonde highlights and adopts a Southern drawl to charming effect. Cherie is neither victim nor innocent, and the gifted Francis finds the right proportion of kittenish alarm to hellcat fury. 

Two of the more difficult (and dated) roles yield mixed results. Rosen’s recently deflowered cowpoke is a baby-man with a temper, and for the first half Rosen seems more like a rodeo fop than a real fella. But his Bo grows on you, acquiring layers of pain and emotional intelligence before your eyes. A great character actor could, hypothetically, dominate the show with Lyman, the most articulate and tragic of these pilgrims, a boozer and sex predator who has enough morals left to know he’s a monster. Bose could have made a meal of this roguish windbag, but I’m sorry to report he barely gets past the bread roll and salad. 

Happily, Villarama’s Virgil is a memorable study in less-is-more. The brooding, guitar-strumming performer (whose role as the DJ in Here Lies Love was electric) becomes the surprise last man standing in Inge’s story, and his melancholy final moments as Grace closes her eatery linger in one’s memory. May an inspired writer pen a sequel to Bus Stop focused entirely on Virgil’s progress. And not without Villarama. 

Truth is, casting is the only way in which this version is nontraditional. The design (sets by Peiyi Wong, costumes by Mariko Ohigashi) stays dutifully in period. Cummings directs by the book, but the pacing and entrances slightly lag. One needn’t go all Ivo van Hove—no one’s asking for live video or nudity and anachronistic pop tunes—but bolder mise en scène could unlock hidden energies. Inge’s repeated plaints on intimacy need a heavier foot on the gas so they don’t cloy the palate. Grace puts it succinctly early on: “Makin’ love is one thing, and being lonesome is another.” She plates the truth, and serves it up fast and hot. 

Bus Stop | 2hrs 10mins. One intermission. | Classic Stage Company | 136 East 13th Street | boxoffice@classicstage.org | Buy Tickets Here    

Dead Outlaw drives the final nail into the 2024-25 Broadway season, and I’ve never felt more alive. Elmer McCurdy’s funeral is the party of the year: wall-to-wall country and rock bangers, a dynamite cast, and a story too weird to be true. Elmer’s tale is uniquely American, a bizarre chronicle of greed, crime, and bad taste. You see, the Maine-born McCurdy rode the rails West to try his hand at train-robbing in Oklahoma, only to get himself shot in a hayloft by a posse at age 30. His embalmed corpse, tipped upright with a rifle in his rigor-mortised hands, became a macabre tourist attraction for decades, carted through various states, passed down to owners under his identity had rotted away. When a location scout for The Six Million Dollar Man discovered the desecrated corpse—naked, painted devil-red, and hanging in an abandoned amusement ride in California in 1976—Elmer’s journey to selfhood and dignity began. 

So goes the (unsentimental) emotional arc of Dead Outlaw, which has an irreverent yet wistful book by Itamar Moses and rootsy earworms by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna. This is a darkly exhilarating musical about life’s wonder, and how hard it can be to find meaning in that wonder. In an early scene, Elmer (Andrew Durand) rests with his fellow bandits one night by train tracks, gazing at the stars. “The sky is black but filled with diamonds,” Durand serenades the heavens, extending his arm. “You can almost hold them in your hands / And up there God is preaching / Laughing while you’re reaching.” Best to savor this fleeting hopefulness of Elmer, whose childhood was marred by parental neglect and his adulthood by booze and rage that drives away a potential love interest (Julia Knitel). Soon after Elmer’s starry idyll, a guitar-strumming Bandleader (Jeb Brown) rips into a rockabilly list song to remind us that our days are numbered: “Between the dark and the dark is / The voice you’re always hear’n / Some crazy auctioneer is always yelling at you. / And you walk, you run, you flee the dark and see the sun / And every brick you ever laid will crumble away.” Gothic gallows humor set to a locomotive beat, “Dead” scythes through a litany of the deceased regardless of time (Balzac, check; Ken Burns, not yet).

As conceived by Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Dead Outlaw often plays like an ingenious concept album, sharing sketches of the antihero’s early days, before breaking into a series of gruesome anecdotes after Elmer’s been pumped full of arsenic to freeze his tissues. Although the musical idioms range anachronistically from bluegrass, ’80s rock anthem, and Las Vegas jazz (the impish Thom Sesma plays a prim pathologist who cuts loose like Bobby Darin), the recurring mode is murder ballad, Appalachian odes to killers and other villains. In musical theater, the most obvious example of the dramatic murder ballad is Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and, more explicitly, Assassins. (Brecht and Weill’s Mackie Messer famously had a stab at it.) Difference here is, the criminal fails and it’s not clear if he ever killed anyone. It’s time and society that commit offenses against nature.

Catchy and crammed with memorable hooks and lyrics that are clever as well as touching, Yazbek and Della Penna have written what is easily the best new score on Broadway since, well, Yazbek’s masterful score for The Band’s Visit (which also had a superb book by Moses). Bearing influences from Frank Loesser to Britpop band XTC, Yazbek has for 25 years remained one of my favorite composer-lyricists. He’s got a witty, skeptical way with melody and lyrics that always reminds you of his roots as a singer-songwriter (Dead Outlaw’s quirky black comedy sent my mind back to the 1996 album The Laughing Man). Along with Jeanine Tesori and Dave Malloy, Yazbek is an artist who sustains hope for the American musical.

After last year’s sold-out run at the Minetta Lane Theatre (produced by Audible, now joined uptown by Sonia Friedman Productions), David Cromer’s lean and stylish production has transferred handsomely to the Longacre. Cromer is a genius at achieving great emotional and narrative force with economy and restraint (also evident in his staging of Good Night, and Good Luck), and he has a splendid cast to work with. There’s the aforementioned Durand, as splendid rocking out in the punk wailer, “Killed a Man in Maine,” as he is being eerily still in a coffin. Willowy and radiant Julia Knitel is a charming newcomer and versatile comedian. Big-voiced Eddie Cooper handles various seedy and sinister roles, notably as a greedy mortician. Possessed of gentler pipes but a dryly hilarious character man, Dashiell Eaves plays a handful of schnooks and crooks. Trent Saunders gets a whole number, “Andy Payne,” in which he has to run a marathon and warble his heart out. Ken Marks takes on several paternal and authority figures with wry zest. Sesma, as noted, is quite moving as the pathologist who demands proper burial for Elmer’s remains. And finally, Jeb Brown is our whiskey-soaked narrator, a down-home raconteur who keeps the fun flowing, no matter how dark it gets.

Brown spends a fair amount of time inside a moveable unit set designed by Anulfo Maldonado, which resembles the stage of a small-town roadhouse floating in an inky void. Around this rock-band island, Cromer creates a procession of striking, penumbral tableaux, his actors lit by Heather Gilbert and costumed across the decades by the outstanding Sarah Laux. Since the piece was originally created to be recorded and distributed on audio by Audible, everything you need to know is in the book and songs, but it’s still a visually engaging treat. My vote for best new musical this season, Dead Outlaw doesn’t preach to any choir or pander to tourists, it’s not based on corporate IP and doesn’t need a star to sell tickets. By the crass expectations of Broadway, that should mean dead on arrival, but I dearly wish this show maximum longevity.

Dead Outlaw | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Longacre Theatre | 220 West 48th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here    

Electra splashed honey and oil on Agamemnon’s tomb and cursed her killer mom. Hamlet wore suits of solemn black and chatted up a ghost. Masha also slayed in funeral garb, mourning her so-called life in tsarist Russia. Moody youths staggered by the finality of death and the emotional nausea of surviving? Theater has it covered. Playwright Eliya Smith adds to the literature with Grief Camp, an elliptical and episodic vibe of a dramedy that laces defiant quirk through deep pain as a cohort of teenagers retreat to the woods and process feelings. 

Paused for three months by a stagehand strike but now back at the Atlantic Theater Company, Grief Camp signals the first major production of the talented Smith. The 27-year-old has the good fortune to work with the great Les Waters (Dana H.), a longtime new-play whisperer who specializes in snaky dramaturgy and design-forward staging that’s heavy on atmospherics. Waters has been busy of late; he’s shuttling from the Atlantic two miles uptown to the Signature Theatre as he preps a revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice—the idiosyncratic twist on Greek myth that he directed almost 20 years ago (also about grief). The emerging Smith and the elder Waters neatly complement each other for this gently lapping, 90-minute wash of wistful, sweet-and-salty exchanges between wounded kids who have lost siblings or parents. Smith churns out the glib, ironic memespeak of Baby Zoomers (cusp of Gen Alpha) perpetually giving “edgy nerd.” Waters and his design team surround the banter and social dynamics with evocative touches (real rain, the play of sunlight, a guitarist strumming on the periphery) and pace each scene to bring out sad strangeness in each character.

Mood is key. I suspect if Smith’s script were played at speed for comic charm, it would be rather irritating. Everyone talks more or less in the same hyperarticulate deadpan, very Wes Anderson. Or Anderson if he let Annie Baker script one of his films. In fact, Smith assisted Baker on Infinite Life nearly two years ago at the Atlantic and is still her playwriting student at the University of Texas at Austin. Smith has clearly absorbed her prof’s signature tactics. Scenes unfold with awkward spontaneity, eschewing plot twists for an organic, unhurried tempo of life, tracing the halting, negative space of daily speech. The difference is that Smith’s characters are more urbane and name-droppy than Baker’s usually earnest folk. These overeducated, overmedicated tykes bond over German choreographer Pina Bausch and joke about being microinfluencers or revel in antique expressions such as “besmirch” and “smite.” Like the team of Baker and director Sam Gold (or, with Infinite Life, James Macdonald) Smith churns out self-consciously heightened dialogue which needs sensitive acting and tonally precise direction in order to be affecting, not affected. 

This ensemble is up to the task, six young performers and two older ones: a mostly silent guitarist (Alden Harris-McCoy) and Danny Wolohan as Rocky, the camp director heard over a crackly loudspeaker, prone to meandering, philosophical morning announcements (not a huge surprise when he misattributes a story to Anne Carson). The campers represent a range of artsy dreamers, territorial boys, sexually curious pubescents—all tiptoeing toward the rest of their lives. Sweet but flaky Luna (Grace Brennan) flits from topic to topic in a frantic dance to charm. Theater geek Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) is busy writing a musical for herself to perform at school called “Untitled Mansion Island Purple House Project.” Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell) and Esther (Lark White) are sisters from Ohio; they lost another sister in a car crash related, we eventually intuit, to Olivia driving while texting. The boys are somewhat less clearly defined. Gideon (Dominic Cross) is the normie cutie distressed when his stuffed dinosaur goes missing. Mama’s boy Bard (Arjun Athalye) is mistakenly called “Brad” by everyone, but he’s too accommodating to correct them. Lastly there’s 22-year-old grief camp alum now counselor Cade (Jack DiFalco), who bunks with the kids but maintains boundaries with them. This becomes especially difficult when Olivia begins a flirtatious dance with Cade, telling him that he keeps reiterating the fact that’s she seventeen because it turns him on. Cade seems to spend an inordinate amount of time jogging and possibly masturbating in the bathroom. We don’t really find out.

Luna is a source of much delicious whimsy: She wonders if her perennial Halloween costume of a carrot will have to be a “sexy carrot” when she gets older. When she locates one of her nail clippings, she raises it on high for everyone to beg favors of the “Toenail God.” Even loopier are the dramaturgical quandaries of Blue, who includes lines from her therapist in a monologue delivered by the ocean. Smith ekes out information about each back story slowly and in understated, sidewise fashion, via throwaway bits of conversation, smuggled in crosstalk, never in hysterical breakdowns about drowning in guilt or wanting to end it all. As audience members, we have to lean in and listen closely between the lines. 

It’s a remarkably lived-in play. You have the sense that Smith built her world in granular detail, establishing a hefty biography for each camper, tracking everyone’s location at all times over the 15-day span of the action. The design enhances this sense of place and the lazy, dreamy passing of time. First and most obviously there’s Louisa Thompson’s cozy and cluttered cabin dotted with box fans, bunk beds, pennants on the wall and clothes heaped everywhere. Oana Botez mismatches and heaps up that colorful apparel with playful style. Incredibly articulate and subtle sunlight filters in thanks to Isabella Byrd. And Bray Poor crafts an array of indoor sound effects, such as the tinny speaker, and outdoor thunder and rainfall. Grief Camp is a banquet of perfectly meshed design, fully inhabited by the lovable, convincing cast.

A Gen X friend who teaches acting in college recently told me her students are more fragile than we were, but they protect each other’s feelings. Students are ready to call out bullying or sexual harassment or use therapy jargon unironically (in Grief Camp, they form a “massage train”). I’ve noticed this reflexive empathy of youngsters depicted in recent work like John Proctor is the Villain, where schoolkids may suffer from chaotic inner lives, but they have each other’s back—particularly women. Same’s true in Grief Camp. There’s sexual tension between Olivia and the older Cade, but it never becomes groomerish. There’s bitchiness and gossip, but no one attacks or plots to hurt anyone. The most violence happens to a green stuffed dinosaur named Ralphie. In my day, tortured adolescents would seethe in Oedipal rage, explode with lust, destroy property. Now they fret over their Duolingo streak or compare the attendance fee of grief camp to horse camp. (For the record, John Proctor has a reference to “horse therapy” so this is nearly a trend.) 

These wise-child heroes sure are a vibe. Is there drama in their vibe? All the tragedies occurred before the play even began. That leaves us with six bereaved minors who just want to be kids again. Smith and Waters force no catharsis or moral lessons on us, just two weeks at camp with weirdos living with death. No cutting, no bulimia, no suicide in the last ten minutes. I felt glad to be in the presence of such a thoughtful and free-spirited writer, who, in taking great care with her characters’ feelings, respects ours. 

Grief Camp | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Atlantic Theater Company | 330 West 20th Street | 646-452-2220 | Buy Tickets Here    

Hard to resist dubbing Caryl Churchill England’s greatest living playwright. Yes, a thousand Stoppard partisans will spit out their PG Tips and insist that Sir Tom deserves the honor, after his decades of deeply researched and cleverly constructed exercises in rhetoric. Both writers are close in age—he 87, she ———and each absolutely shaped postwar British theater, but my vote goes to Churchill. Where Stoppard has offered many a glib answer, Churchill has left us with appalling questions. Across more than 50 years her clinical yet fiercely moral studies of the human animal in all its fluid, chaotic, unknowable glory have retained prophetic intensity. Gender, class, revolution, cloning, cycles of revenge, how we die—those are just some of the primal hyperobjects Churchill has dissected in language as clear and cutting as a glass scalpel. What dramatist has juggled form and genre so deftly, mastering social realism, fable, science fiction, and lyrical deconstruction? To witness a mind still finding new ways to pare language and stage imagery to their explosive core, head to the Public, where four of Churchill’s latest short works blaze forth in outstanding American debuts: Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.

Several years after her political glosses on the Israel-Palestine conflict (Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza), American and British complicity in war crimes (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You), and our atomized digital age (Love and Information), what obsesses Churchill these days? Myths, spirits, and other denizens of an unseen realm. (Mind you, since Vinegar Tom and The Skriker she has explored folk horror and supernatural invasion.) 

Staged with immaculate focus by her longtime collaborator James Macdonald, these short works range from 12 minutes to an hour. They each have a dreamy queasiness overlaid with terse, suggestive language that carries undertones of violence. Glass follows a fragile but feisty girl made of glass (Ayana Workman) and veers into a story of child abuse and suicide. Kill presents a debonair deity (Deirdre O’Connell) perched on a cloud summarizing Greek myths with a breeziness that curdles into anguish, as she catalogues a fugue of incest, murder, vengeance, chopping children into a stew. What If If Only is a modern mystery play about a grieving man (Sathya Sridharan) learning to live in the present, buffeted by ghosts of the future. Lastly, the one-act Imp is a shaggy domestic tale with glimmers of the occult: a wish-fulfilling sprite corked up in a bottle by a sickly ex-nurse (O’Connell again) who lives with her inscrutable cousin (John Ellison Conlee). Surrogate parents of a sort, they watch with mixed feelings the courtship between their Irish niece (Adelind Horan) and a melancholy homeless man (Japhet Balaban).

Between the shorter pieces in the first half, Macdonald inserts a pair of circus acts: the awesome hand-balancing control of Junru Wang, and the comedy juggling of sly pin-flipper Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These carnival palate cleansers, along with cheeky light bulbs that ring the proscenium’s red curtain (scenic design by London fixture Miriam Buether), contribute to an arch vaudeville vibe (or, since it’s Churchill, oddville). I kept searching for a visual analog to the writing. Wang is able to rest her weight on the muscles and bones of her arm, as she inverts her body atop a slender metal pole with round plate for her hand, legs scissoring with balletic grace. Likewise, Churchill’s language is often spare and blunt (like later Beckett, she can say more with less), resting crushing concepts atop the steel bones of a terse phrase.

If such airy meditations don’t interest you, simply luxuriate in the theater: an excellent cast and Buether’s boldly morphing interiors—a glowing horizontal bar in black, a room of diaphanous white, a homey living room. They keep you locked into Churchill’s hallucinatory vignettes. Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound design contribute to the dual aura of magic and menace. What a privilege to see O’Connell, an actress of tremendous grit and spontaneity, tear through the incantatory, ancient horrors of “Kill” and then settle into the bitter and moody Dot of Imp, which closes the show on a somber note of redemption and stasis. In a gentler register, Conlee plays Dot’s affable but repressed cousin, Jimmy, who wards off the blues by jogging. Churchill establishes a quirky running joke: Jimmy describes various acquaintances and strangers he encounters on his runs, whose stories are barely concealed summaries of Othello, King Lear, Medea, Hamlet, and other Greek tragedies and Shakespeare. “I saw an old guy this morning when it was raining,” Jimmy tells Dot. “Used to have his own business and he gave it all over to his daughters, I suppose it was a tax thing, and they’re treating him so badly. He’s really out of it; he’s not like the same person at all.”

Tragedy isn’t just flowery language and flashy emoting in the playhouse. It’s bleeding on the street, shivering in the park. Put it another way: All the world is Churchill’s stage.

Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. | 2hrs 15mins. One intermission. | Public Theater | 425 Lafayette Street | 212-967-7555 | Buy Tickets Here    

John Proctor is the Villain—not much subtlety in the title or the first line: “Sex.” It’s spoken by a charming English lit teacher guiding students through a sex-ed primer; later they’ll dive (gladly) into Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Here’s a play about male authority and the exploitation of children and right off, Kimberly Belflower shoves her themes in our face. On the nose much? Well, good. Sometimes it takes a cuff on the schnoz to wake up and learn. Belflower has written the most energizing and emotionally wrecking drama this season, an unsentimental education for teens screaming to stay sane in a fucked society. 

The author describes the setting, Helen County High, as “the only high school in one-stoplight town” in Northeast Georgia. “My dad says we’re getting another stoplight!” notes Ivy (Maggie Kuntz), the rich (but sweet) girl in a friend group that includes purity-pledged Raelynn (Amalia Yoo), savvy Atlanta transplant Nell (Morgan Scott), and insecure people pleaser Beth (Fina Strazza). Outside that feminine orbit are two boys, the aggressive normie Lee (Hagan Oliveras) and Mason (Nihar Duvveri), who’s chill verging on checked out. Further out in the solar system spins Shelby (Sadie Sink), a motormouthed hybrid of punk and dork who just returned from an unexplained six-month leave of absence, inspiring whispers (breakdown? baby?). Deepening Shelby’s isolation is the fact that she slept with Raelynn’s then-boyfriend, Lee. 

So much for the adolescent players. On the adult side there’s perky school counselor Bailey (Molly Griggs), barely seven years older than the girls, still swimming in her own student memories at the institution. Last and slipperiest is Carter Smith (Gabriel Ebert), the putative adult in the room and, at first, the very image of benevolent authority. When Beth, who seesaws between self-deprecation and bursts of pique, apologizes for complaining about spending class time on sex ed, Mr. Smith strikes a kindly, courtly note: 

no no no

I didn’t mean to sound like I was minimizing the way you feel

and honestly?

it has been kind of a bummer

that time adds up

and look

let’s be real

I know you guys already know about sex…

He’s the classic “cool teacher,” Mr. Smith. Dude knows the lyrics to Lorde’s “Green Light.” He presents as an ally, doesn’t talk down or pretend he knows everything, treats kids like adults. Exactly how adult is the sickening time bomb that will detonate when Shelby hijacks the class with an interpretation of The Crucible that points out that the young women who led accusations of witchcraft in 1692 Salem were traumatized by war, terrorism and a patriarchal culture of rape against which they had no defense. Did some Puritan girls have public meltdowns that led to the execution of men and women as witches? In such conditions, what girl would not go mad?

From Freud to Jiddu Krishnamurti and beyond, the question has recurred: in a sick society, how do we judge illness? It was also raised in British playwright Joe Penhall’s gripping Blue/Orange, which the Atlantic Theater produced in 2002. In it, a psychiatrist treating a Black British man in a hospital struggles with the realization that living inside racism can trigger schizophrenia as much as neurochemistry. By contrast, Belflower doesn’t pathologize her young adults or let them be merely victims or hormonal freaks. They are mostly articulate, intelligent and kind, not overmedicated or over-mediated on phones, and not a bunch of Bible-thumping white hicks, despite what an East Coast audience might expect. The year is 2018, so they’re pre-pandemic but in the first wave of #MeToo in a rural community, and that context figures heavily in the awakening consciousness of Shelby and the others. Some of the girls want to form a “Feminism Club” and Mr. Smith volunteers to be their faculty sponsor. No need to give away any more plot except to say that Belflower braids the Miller studies and revealing her protagonists’ damage with immense storytelling grace and humor. She clearly loves her characters and the inner life with which she endows them bursts through in authentic, vibrant performances.  

I cannot overpraise the talented cast and the snappy production, which moves like a bullet train and ends with a rebellious “Presentation Day” dance that sends shivers down your spine and tears down your cheeks. Sink and Yoo enter in white peasant dresses and enact a visionary feminist rewrite on The Crucible, then burn the house down with a war dance to, yes, “Green Light” (superb primal movement courtesy of Tilly Evans-Krueger). Sound, costumes and scenic design—by Palmer Hefferan, Sarah Laux, and AMP/Teresa L. Williams, respectively—conjure up the classroom and subtle class distinctions perfectly. Special praise to illumination goddess Natasha Katz, whose clublike lighting of the cathartic dance and shock-flash-and-blackout effects keep this live-wire play crackling.  

From Stranger Things, we know that Sink has the “ginger badass” shtick down pat, but she proves herself a passionate stage presence alongside equally gifted cast members. Strazza, as mousy, try-hard Beth—on whom Mr. Smith lavishes much attention—registers levels of panic by forever tugging sleeves over her hands, a nervous tic that signals a desire to be smaller, dismembered. So good at riding the line between genial fop and towering brute, Ebert does subtle, assured work as (sorry, let’s face it) a monster. Not since Father Flynn first faced off with Sister Aloysius in Doubt more than 20 years ago has there been such a battle for the safety of innocents. Only here there’s no implacable nun to save the day.  

Between The Outsiders and John Proctor, Dayna Taymor seems to be the reigning director for affecting teen tragedies. Makes sense: high schoolers are tragic heroes in liminal crisis, pincered between a childhood (perhaps) fondly remembered and a future of pain and disillusionment. The downy chicks molt and pin feathers pierce tender flesh. A century-plus ago, Frank Wedekind pointed the way with his blistering Spring Awakening; adolescence is the furnace in which you burn to death or forge a suit of armor. The students in John Proctor frequently reference major life events still within reach: Twilight coming out when they were seven, copying homework in sixth grade, or going steady since fourth grade. They’re reciting the sweet, green times, clutching the slim volume of their short lives, before starting a new chapter no longer written in their hand. 

John Proctor is the Villain | 1hr 45mins. No intermission. | Booth Theatre | 222 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here