Kyle Turner — Theater Critic

Paranormal Activity’s nightmare fuel makes for a wonderfully inventive and terrifying variation on the American domestic drama, taking a couple on the brink and turning the ghosts of their guilt and unhappiness into an entrancing extravaganza.

It’s been about a decade since Rosie O’Donnell was on the New York stage, and she hasn’t lost an ounce of her panache. But while her last special, 2015's A Heartfelt Stand Up, was billed as a comedy act, her newest, Common Knowledge, is billed as a solo show. The difference between the two can feel like splitting hairs, especially for someone like O’Donnell, who started doing stand-up in 1979. But Common Knowledge does feel more like storytelling than an hourlong set of bits strung together.

There’s a strange neatness that arises from the characters, a clear mathematical equation as to who’s saving whom: Michael wants to save Paul, who wants to save Julian, who wants to be saved by Judy, who is tasked with saving Michael. The Saviors could use a little more complexity, a bit more texture to make its world as real as the two young boys who inhabit it.

In its attempt to sketch an illustration of people whose cultural, religious, political, and national history has transformed dramatically over millennia and has been forced to “meet a moment” in the contemporary landscape, one hopes that more plays will extend such curiosity to other ethnic communities and diasporas facing similar experiences of scrutiny, rupture, and togetherness.

Dad Don’t Read This is fueled by the intensity of these small moments that accumulate: how you tell your friends things, the tiny misunderstandings that create an ever-growing wedge, the petty jealousies of who hangs out with whom and when, the thrill of dancing around in your room, the feverish anticipation of hearing something new about the person at school whom you all dislike (or maybe not). It's like we're peeking into moments we shouldn’t: There’s an intoxicating danger to listening to young girls break up and make up, these tiny moments representative of the choices they make to become themselves.

Dad Don’t Read This is fueled by the intensity of these small moments that accumulate: how you tell your friends things, the tiny misunderstandings that create an ever-growing wedge, the petty jealousies of who hangs out with whom and when, the thrill of dancing around in your room, the feverish anticipation of hearing something new about the person at school whom you all dislike (or maybe not). It's like we're peeking into moments we shouldn’t: There’s an intoxicating danger to listening to young girls break up and make up, these tiny moments representative of the choices they make to become themselves.

There’s a nostalgia evident in the show and in the cast’s performances, and as their relationship and health drama unfolds, it borders on honorific. Yet the tactility of these characters’ lives struggles to materialize despite solid performances and a fine text.

Even at its most heightened moments, The Maids never captures the electrifying danger that comes with witnessing either the consequences of the characters’ behavior or something revolutionary being done with the theatrical form. The production is so concerned with making itself contemporary, in transforming the text into a treatise on the artificiality of our current age, that it’s made no room for anyone’s soul.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s nervy fun, total sincerity, and embrace of over-the-top theatricality are already reason enough for the curious cat to check it out. But that it turns Cats into an electrifying community that audiences get to join makes The Jellicle Ball the must-see show of this or any season, and the bar against which revivals of canon shows should be measured against.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball’s nervy fun, total sincerity, and embrace of over-the-top theatricality are already reason enough for the curious cat to check it out. But that it turns Cats into an electrifying community that audiences get to join makes The Jellicle Ball the must-see show of this or any season, and the bar against which revivals of canon shows should be measured against.

There’s a curious feeling that the production, directed by Trip Cullman, spends much of its run time sneering at its characters as it attempts to land every joke (and the show is very funny), which has the unfortunate effect of making this quasi-farce full of caricatures and not people. Thus, Max’s more reactionary points and Susan’s nihilism dilute the clarity of the ideas the show gestures toward: the compromise and ignorance necessary for love to function, the importance of incorporating others' pain into your existence, the way power is wielded between loved ones, the weakening of a generation by way of therapy talk. Though 150 minutes worth of poison-dart dialogue is fun to watch, by the end of the show, I couldn’t figure out what it was aiming for.

The turgid impulses of Ziegler’s writing — including a laughable line where Keenan-Bolger says, “[Antigone] taught me I was enough!” — sacrifice both Antigone's and Perkins’s ability to display their shared insurgency, magnitude, and furious iconoclasm.

The turgid impulses of Ziegler’s writing — including a laughable line where Keenan-Bolger says, “[Antigone] taught me I was enough!” — sacrifice both Antigone's and Perkins’s ability to display their shared insurgency, magnitude, and furious iconoclasm.

In the swift, no-nonsense, and riveting What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the unraveling of Dick and Elle’s family unfolds across direct addresses from Dick, Elle, their son Tim (John Early), and Dick’s mistress Elaine (Hope Davis). Playwright and theatre stalwart Wallace Shawn illustrates a family, a New York social scene, and a modest web of relationships and competing desires — sexual, romantic, professional — that are at once casually straightforward and sprawlingly novelistic. Complex and sometimes ugly feelings are rendered with precision and wit. Performances, uniformly excellent, vacillate between the slightly paranoid awareness of being observed — as if giving a talking-head interview for a documentary — and the grimy closeness of a conversation at a bar after a few glasses of white zinfandel.

Although Night Side Songs’s lyrics intermittently disappoint in their ungainliness, the show’s overall effect is impressive nonetheless. There’s a sense of communion the show reaches for and nearly achieves, as if sickness and suffering, as despairing as they can be to experience, are part of an infinite cycle of being taken care of and caring for others. Like time is composed of people by each other’s bedsides for eternity.

Challenging certain creeds about motherhood has been on the minds of playwrights this season, with Liberation on Broadway, The Waterfall off Broadway at WP Theater, and now Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood off Broadway at Second Stage Theater. But while the memory play Liberation and the two-hander The Waterfall are relatively conventional in form, Meat Suit, written and directed by Aya Ogawa, is a jolting and sometimes riotously funny take on motherhood narratives.

Challenging certain creeds about motherhood has been on the minds of playwrights this season, with Liberation on Broadway, The Waterfall off Broadway at WP Theater, and now Meat Suit, or the shitshow of motherhood off Broadway at Second Stage Theater. But while the memory play Liberation and the two-hander The Waterfall are relatively conventional in form, Meat Suit, written and directed by Aya Ogawa, is a jolting and sometimes riotously funny take on motherhood narratives.

For all the supposedly novel tech involved, it’s a rather dull experience. Even at a compact 45 minutes, An Ark began to lose this critic’s interest after the first 20. While a live performance of this text staged in the same way wouldn’t be much more interesting, at least its liveness would connect the performers and audience members. The ephemerality of the mixed-reality venture, meant to conjure the liminality of not-quite the afterlife, is compelling in theory, but the show does little to challenge or excite beyond its gadgetry.

While the absence of real tension (besides that signaled by the countdown) is frustrating, Strong and Manville find dramatic urgency in their relationship, played as misplaced optimism (or is it opportunism?) and passionate drive. The clarity of their want for one another, and their shared desire to propel themselves to power, rings sharp and crystalline. Even as doubt sets in, Strong and Manville’s dynamic is magnetic and explosive, like it's about to set the whole world on fire.

44 The Musical doesn’t seem to understand what these people believe in, even if they are caricatures, and one is left wondering what a more original satire of the era might look like. A song about bombing Osama Bin Laden and a platitude about how “they would rather watch a Black man fail than the country succeed” aside, 44: The Musical has little idea of Obama's platform, his flaws, or what his complex legacy means.

Droege could have penned a compelling autopsy report on contemporary gay male culture or a conduit for intermittently creative, pop culture-based barbs, and this play is the latter. It’s a massive disappointment, as Droege is a capable writer on a line-to-line level, with a decent vantage point about 30something gay people’s vices and virtue signaling. The blueprint for these men’s tiny, self-indulgent worldviews — where actresses, drug dealers, and tea dances dominate and people of color are a blip — is there. But Messy White Gays appears to have little interest in teasing out these privileges beyond shrill squabbling.

It’s all a bit humdrum, victim to obvious bio-play problems: It's narratively scattered and thematically unfocused, without much of a perspective about any of these people. The first act hits the biggest points in the show’s timeline, but it sells short the feeling of being swept up in any of it. An attempt to do a “show within a show” gimmick fails. The performances are generally competent to enthusiastic, but the actors are routinely trapped between doing impressions vs. individualistic takes. Caitlin Houlahan (as Jane Curtin) and Evan Rubin (as Gilda Radner) are among the few cast members whose own voices shine through their depictions of the real SNL players.

Saturday Church’s heart is in the right place, but its conventionality overpowers the serene joy that comes with just being around your people.

Holland, having emanated something similar all those years ago in the same role, thus gives his Ogun the tragedy of understanding, making him feel all the more devastated by Oshoosi’s surrender to something that may prove self-destructive. But perhaps it’s that same awareness, and touch of history within the production itself, that allows the finale to land with such revelatory beauty, fueled by an incendiary hope and fraternal bond.

The directorial vision of the working-class tailor-turned-couture provocateur is basically absent from the show, leaving the audience to imagine a clearer picture of not only what McQueen's clothes looked like, but how they were part of an ambitious point of view that epitomized what the late designer did best: sew fashion, nightmare, fantasy, and theatre together. McQueen was once called fashion’s “closest thing to a rockstar,” but House of McQueen, written by Darrah Cloud and directed by Sam Helfrich, relegates one of the most theatrical fashion designers of all time to surface-level banality.