Maya Phillips

For as much as the play is about the very real and very prescient themes of Black incarceration, brotherhood and Black masculinity, “The Brothers Size” doesn’t feel as grounded as it needs to be to make these relationships and motifs sing. The show has the capacity to explore this deep lyricism while maintaining its footing, however, as it proves in a quiet scene late in the play where Oshoosi and Elegba are sitting outside at night. Here the show slows its pace to linger with these men; the lights dim and the sound of crickets chirp in the background. It’s the scene that stays so vividly in my mind not for any particular line delivery or turn in the plot but because it is where the abstract most gracefully meets the concrete. That was where the play felt most alive.

Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.

Scott Elliott’s direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard’s work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. ... These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard’s script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances.

“The Blood Quilt,” like another show now playing Off Broadway, Dominique Morisseau’s “Bad Kreyòl,” similarly buckles under the weight of an attempt to capture the totality of a cultural experience. Gullah Geechee sea island Blackness, Caribbean-American Blackness — these are experiences that deserve representation, but not necessarily in one fell swoop. And yet in an art form that already lacks for marginalized stories, theater is also a space where Blackness has historically been — and to some extent still is — flattened into a singular African-American experience. So is there space for more? Perhaps a series of Kwemera plays that are given adequate space to sprawl out. Or a more focused, finely drawn sketch of Kwemera life that, like Clementine’s stitches, are “so tight even wind can’t whisper its way through.” Either way, I welcome more quilts to the collection.

Like the film it’s based on, “Shit. Meet. Fan.” offers an ending that suggests some or all of what we’ve seen on this night of an eclipse may not be exactly as it seems. It feels a lot like a cop-out. So laughs and astronomical feats aside, perhaps the most substantial thing this play offers is a new cardinal rule for every social occasion: Either be honest, or hold on tight to your phone’s passcode.

Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear,” which opened Thursday night at the Shed, is a tragedy that doesn’t seem to know why it’s so tragic. The production’s fleet and feathery interpretation of how one man’s decline rains down misfortune on everyone around him undercuts the gravity of the classic, demoting it into a mere trifle.

Now “The Wiz” returns to Broadway in a revival directed by Schele Williams and an updated book by Amber Ruffin, with the aim of creating a take “through the Blackest of Black lenses.” This new production, which opened at the Marquis Theater on Tuesday, showcases creative visuals and some standout performances, but stops short of bringing modern Blackness to Broadway.

And yet the odd characters in “Des Moines,” which had its New York premiere on Friday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, can’t even use the depth chargers (as they call the drink) that they consume as an excuse for their peculiarities. The play, written by Denis Johnson and presented by Theater for a New Audience with Evenstar Films, drops a cast of characters into the depths and doesn’t try to reel them back in. Instead, we’re often the ones lost at sea.

And yet even among Wilson's outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, 'The Piano Lesson,' both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It's a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.

This play left me breathless, and I'm not just using a manner of speech. As I made my way through the crowd of people exiting the theater, I took hard, shallow breaths, knowing that one deep inhale could set off a downpour of tears. This production either broke or mended something in me; I felt - brilliantly, painfully, cathartically - near the point of physical exhaustion.

Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in 'The Kite Runner,' which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Thursday night, is of the kites. They're miniature, attached to thin poles that several actors wave, white tissue-paper flitting, birdlike, over their heads. The paper crinkles as the kites part the air with a soft swish. If only the rest of this stiff production, adapted by Matthew Spangler from the popular 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini, exuded such elegance.

The tricky task I face as a critic is figuring out how to write about a work whose brilliance has already been noted. The New York Times named the show a critic's pick in 2019, and I wrote briefly about the show's Broadway tryout in Washington, D.C., this fall. It's already won the Pulitzer. And yet, it seems as if there is no measure of praise that could be too much; after all, this is a show that allows a Black gay man to be vulnerable onstage without dismissing or fetishizing his trauma, desires and creative ambitions. Now that's some radical theater.

And yet 'How I Learned to Drive' is also funny. The play doesn't sink with the gravity of its subject matter; it finds moments of levity without minimizing the tragic parts of the story. Occasionally, however, Brokaw doesn't have the lightest touch with the production's comedy and often fails to give the more stirring scenes the extra beat they require before things move along.

Repetition can make magic happen: repeat a word or a phrase enough times and it breathes new life, fresh meaning. Or repetition can strip language until all that's left are empty rhythms and sounds. Words are funny like that. Noah Haidle's 'Birthday Candles,' which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, tries to build poignancy and depth through moments that repeat like a record needle stuck in a groove. Instead, this Roundabout Theater Company production gets caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes.

O'Farrell and the Kirkpatrick brothers, whose previous Broadway outing was the 2015 musical 'Something Rotten!,' generate a smattering of laughs with the original material, like Frank's quirk of shouting whenever he lies, and the second half of Daniel's makeover song, when the list of fashion inspirations for a matronly Scottish nanny change from the glamorous Jackie O. and Princess Di to the more practical Margaret Thatcher and Julia Child. And a chorus of singing and dancing internet chefs, there via the magic of a tablet to help Mrs. Doubtfire cook dinner, is hilariously interrupted by an ad for IBS. Yet the scenes that draw the biggest laughs here are still the ones that are almost identical to the ones in the film.

It's a question that Scott's Broadway debut, which opened on Wednesday night at the John Golden Theater, doesn't quite know how to answer. Incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs performed by its cast of seven, 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which first premiered in 2019 at Syracuse Stage in a co-production with Baltimore Center Stage, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America but only delivers a gussied-up string of straw-man lessons.

It always comes back to Nanny, with her stiff back and neatly folded arms; Santiago-Hudson's rendering evokes a Cicely Tyson type, a strong Black matriarch not to be trifled with. His narrative performance is impressive for many reasons, but one of the most nuanced is the way Santiago-Hudson sees it all, as a child eavesdropping and peeking through doorways, with curious and affectionate eyes. He grounds us in the details, which brings not just these characters, but also a whole town to life: the way a woman pops her hips, the way a man coughs, even the particular tint of the Lackawanna snow. After all, people may think the blues are about heartbreak, but to get to heartbreak, you first have to pass through love.