Derek McCracken - Page 3

With a certain and subdued beauty, NOTES ON MY MOTHER'S DECLINE softens the blow that expectations, memory and loss deal to a contemporary mother/son relationship. Even as vivid descriptions of remembered sights, smells, tastes and textures fill their liminal space, a void of grief remains.

Written by Dann Berg and Avital Asuleen (Director/Choreographer), THE FLOORSHOW intersperses song-and-dance numbers into the dramatization of the personal and professional hurdles that an all-female performance troupe faces in 1951 New York City. Moving between onstage and backstage at The Gilded Palace, THE FLOORSHOW nests an emotionally rich female-sisterhood narrative within a framework of creative competition and sexism.

As ALL THE RAGE begins, warm stage light casts shadows across a simple set: a lamp, a globe, a long table, and a pair of blackboard maps. From this apt academic environment we get schooled in emotional geography by writer/storyteller Martin Moran. This timely revival of his award-winning 2013 performance retains its potent blend of compassion, catharsis and droll humor.

Step aside, Joseph; your amazing technicolor dreamcoat has some serious competition. When Harriet Powers' beautiful bible quilt appears onstage in QUILTING THE SUN, it's an applause-generating showstopper for a play where common threads of dreams, rituals, faith and family are stitched together against a backdrop of religion and racism.

Swipe, scan, pause, like. Swipe, scan, pause, like. Feel familiar? Part of the attraction and addiction to scrolling through social media is its mind-numbing repetition. A similar effect infuses the U.S. premiere of SEE YOU: a group of verbose 20-somethings vying for superior digital cultural status weight the risks and rewards of creating and sustaining a digital presence. For these seemingly self-absorbed characters, their lives are defined by (and basically depend on) how well they curate compelling online personas. Thus, what begins as an egocentric free-for-all eventually dovetails into how a deliberate data breach among friends (with benefits) exposes secrets, truths and consequences.

The whole of Contact High from Theater 511 is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a good thing in light of this show's plethora of moving parts within its kaleidoscopic plot. The result is a timely coming-of-age pop-rock musical that tells a lyrical and satirical story of drug addiction, the need for human connection, and hope.

In Patience, Daniel (Joshua Gitta) is a former prodigy who is now the world's #1 professional solitaire player. He's also going through a millennial 'mid-life' crisis. Young, black, talented, and restless, he inhabits a solo space in a game/sport that values reactions not reflections, shuffling between self-doubt and confidence with a gravitational pull on the people orbiting his success. With his happiness, posterity and legacy all at stake, he navigates his day-to-day existence and choices in light of his long-term trajectory. Playwright Johnny G. Lloyd deals us a winning hand: a compelling ensemble of relatable characters within a wryly written house-of-cards story that doesn't collapse under its own thematic weight.

This review is not about Monica Lewinsky. Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky, stars Caroline Kinsolving as the complex, archetype-defying quasi-Monica. This clever time-shifting one-act play succinctly captures the tension between holding on and letting go of one's identity in an era where private lives are frequently made public either strategically or by scandal.

A White Man's Guide to Rikers Island transports the audience from the privilege and prominence of a New Jersey golf club to the cacophony and brutality of New York's Rikers Island. Occasional moments of levity stand in stark contrast to the overall gravity of the violence-laden narrative, one that explores how Richard Roy (a straight, white, cisgender male) adapted to life as a racial minority in the world's largest penal colony that is 92% Black or Hispanic. Roy spares no detail of his personal lived experience at Rikers; guilt, shame, terror and sadness permeate the play and haunt him still.

The thought of spending time at a lake for a reunion tends to conjure up images of relaxing on the dock, grilling food, and mixing drinks with conversation. Time at Black Lake, though, is more mercurial in nature, rippling across relationships. At Black Lake unfolds as an opaque memory/mystery play where time doesn't heal wounds--it scratches the surface until clues trickle like blood.

Technically, the silver lining of the black hole trash compactor featured in Black Hole Wedding is that whatever it doesn't suck in, it stretches out: a golf club, clothing, even a pom-pom shaking marketing director. Theatrically, this 'spaghettify' strategy also works well for the show itself, a campy eco-political satire with more than enough humorous and heartfelt songs and sight gags to keep its musical magnetic attraction strong for 100 minutes.

The tragicomedy Imminently Yours buoys some historically heavy subject matter with a contemporary lift, giving voice to the experience of multiple generations of African-Americans who thrive in a contradictory space where secrecy and support are both critical to survival.

Dropped calls are the worst--unless you're Luke Wilson, and then dropped gumballs cause a bigger headache. Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson ricochets plenty of candy and themes, but in its 75 minutes, this thin workplace-humor production doesn't give us enough to chew on.

Straying from the traditional 'one playwright, one narrative' dramatic structure, the through line of this devised 60-minute show is a series of 20+ vignettes skimming the life and times of notable and troubled French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The individual scenes, which range from 'Nice Tea With Mother' to 'Venereal Diseases Aren't Funny: The Doctor' serve up brief-but-beguiling sketches of the people, places and problems of his 36-year life. What hinders this production is not the performers themselves, but the cramped performance space that affects lighting, actor movement, and audience sight lines.

Earth, air, water, and fire - every vital element reaches critical risk level in Last Man Club, an engaging, dystopian mood piece from writer/director Randy Sharp at Axis Theater. This tense one-act historical drama blows in with gale force as Sharp and her creative team unearth the allure and agony of manifest destiny compounded by an environmental crisis. We see hope through an apocalyptic lens as tragedy howls outside the door.

Absurd, engaging and frequently flat-out surprising, Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 is a tasty mouthful of downtown theater. Genders bend, time warps, roles reverse and sobriety teeters in this contemporary and contemplative ghost story from the expansive imagination of playwright Alex Borinsky and director Augustus Heagerty.

At its core, The Buffalo Play is a unique contemporary centering of human folly set among flora and fauna, pitting Woman (apologetic and naive) against Buffalo (snorting and skeptical). They engage in a primal tete-a-tete that explores what it means to be an outsider, to be human, and the repercussions of a good deed gone bad.

The turntables spin gold in 'Original Sound,' a fresh and frenetic take on the promise and perils of guarding intellectual content in the music industry. Sebastian Chacon kills as Danny Solis, a talented amateur Nuyorican beat maker whose primary instruments are his computer, his confidence, and his affable charm.

Playwright Penny Jackson packs generations of family drama into this one-act 90-minute "jukebox" play, which has some memorable moments, lots of laughs, but an all-too-familiar feel where love, loss and liquor seep into every scene of Irish turmoil.

In a tale as old as FaceTime, Electronic City pulses with potential as a dynamic dystopian mash-up where LED, KLM, EDM and 'news' of J-Lo's CVS H20 all vie for our short attention spans. Art imitates and pixelates life, and a co-dependency on little screens leads to big problems for Joy (Jeanne Laurent Smith) and Tom (Brandon Lee Olson), a disconnected but determined couple whose relationship status can best be described as 'buffering.'