The Play's the Thing

Okay, look, I get it, two-handers are tough. You have two characters with which to tell your story, and you have to somehow tell this story with as little exposition as possible. You have to show, not tell. Are you listening, Donja Love? Love's current play, Fireflies , tells the story of a married African American couple in 1963. He's a preacher, traveling the southern part of the country to speak at the funerals of other African Americans who have died due to racial terrorism. (When the play begins, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Birmingham has just occurs.) She's a doting and devoted housewife who goes so far as to write her husband's speeches and sermons for him. But what her husband, Charles, doesn't know is that she secretly smokes, she wants to abort the baby she's carrying, and she writes explicit letters to a woman she's in love with whom she only met once, briefly. Oh, and did I mention she, Olivia, has PTSD a...

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...

There are two words that never fail to excite me when it comes to theater (and nowadays, film): Martin McDonagh. The Pillowman was the first play I ever saw on stage, and to this day remains the best production I've ever seen. It was perfect. And it led me to devour the rest of McDonagh's body of work, and ultimately, he became one of my biggest influences as a playwright. He truly is a genius. His work over the last seven or eight years, however, has had diminishing returns. And yet, still admirable. McDonagh is writing out of his comfort zone, getting more creative, no longer writing what he knows. Granted, something like The Beauty Queen of Leenane is brilliant but McDonagh could not write plays about small town Irish life forever. And I love that he himself acknowledged this and is branching out. Quite frankly, if you ask me, between his plays and his movies, no two works are alike (even the plays that are connected.) So when his Olivier-winning play Hangmen was announ...