The Play's the Thing

A new revival (revisal?) of One a Clear Day You Can See Forever is now running at the Irish Repertory Theatre. You can make as many changes as you want and rework the book as much as you want but the show is inherently flawed and will probably never work. But the score, oh the score. Which leads me to my next and last point... Nobody, and I mean nobody , is Barbara Harris. See? So don't bother.

The best thing about the new musical This Ain't No Disco is that whenever I hear the title I start to sing one of my favorite Talking Heads songs, "Life During Wartime." And that might be the only good thing about it. Writing a musical about Studio 54 (and the Mudd Club) and New York of the 1970s is a herculean task. Stephen Trask, Rick Elice, and Peter Yankowitz would've been smarter to streamline their plot and focus on the club(s) themselves, make the whole show about owner Steve Rubell and the debauchery of not just the scene but the city. Instead we get an incredibly cliched and sanitized musical about not just the clubs and Rubell but also two young people trying to get famous (although I'm not really sure that's even what they want), drug use, self-harm, incest/rape, a character that is called The Artist (just refer to him as Andy Warhol, for cryin' out loud, we all know who he is supposed to be), someone named Binky, and a trans character, for...

Sometimes a play is so bland, so inert, that it becomes offensive. That play is Fire in Dreamland . That's not to say there aren't a lot of interesting ideas in Rinne Groff's new play. Yes, writing a play about a foreign filmmaker making a movie about the 1911 fire in Coney Island and the disillusioned, aimless woman who becomes obsessed with him and the movie seems like a good idea. Setting it right after Superstorm Sandy is an even better idea. There is much to mine from this. But as a native Brooklynite who knows Coney Island well and lived in the borough during Sandy, it feels like Groff didn't quite understand the neighborhood, it's rich history, and it's long-time struggles. She merely skims the surface of the racism and classism that was evident in the area (before and) after the hurricane. It's as though Groff mentions it because she should but really has no interesting in developing it an idea from it. It's criminally underwritten. If she'...

I saw Tracy Letts' August: Osage County towards the end of its run, and I sat at the Music Box theater completely engrossed, hanging on every word. It was truly edge of your seat theater, and it's still one of my favorite theater-going experiences of all time. And then Letts played George in the magnificent revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another one of my favorite theater-going experiences, with a performance that remains one of my all-time favorites. After reading/seeing some of his other plays, seeing him act on screen, I was pretty much convinced that the man is a god. So imagine my excitement when Second Stage announced they were transferring Mary Page Marlowe from Steppenwolf. Sometimes your heroes let you down. Look, Letts hasn't let me down completely. The writing of Mary Page Marlowe is still incredibly strong, and it was refreshing to see a play that wasn't trying to be the most topical and timely play in all the land. It's just ...

What do we want from plays? Okay, that's a very broad question. After the first scene of Jordan Harrison's new play Log Cabin , during which the affluent gay characters gather in a fancy New York City apartment (that is no doubt owned, not rented) in 2012 to discuss getting married and...AIDS, I turned to my boyfriend and said, "yes, because gay people only talk about being gay." And that's all of these characters, gay, trans, and straight, talk about. (Well, there's some shoehorned race discussions as well, because that's another hot button issue right now so why not?) We don't know much about them other than they're gay, or trans, or only date trans men. The only other info we get about them is that they are wealthy. Because of course they are. These are gay people who are no longer dying of AIDS, who can now get married, have children, be at least somewhat accepted by and have a place in society, and of course, have trust funds and be succ...

It kind of amazes me that Joshua Harmon has had so many plays produced in such a short period of time. This is not a knock at the quality of his writing or his talent. It's more about content and context. In an ever-changing theater landscape, where theater companies seem to be moving away from plays about affluent white people with affluent white problems, Harmon's plays seem like relics. (Although it's telling that they're produced by companies like Roundabout and Lincoln Center and not more adventurous companies like MCC or even Playwrights Horizons.) His latest offering, Skintight , which opened at, you guessed it, Roundabout, is yet another entry that focuses on very rich white people and their first world problems. Is there still a place in 2018 for a play like Skintight , that revolves around an incredibly wealthy Jewish clothing designer (think Calvin Klein), Elliot, his wealthy lawyer daughter, her over-privileged gay 20 year old son (he's studying Quee...