Sara Holdren

Sometimes, one of the most entertaining parts of a performance is the audience — especially when the show has shimmied and elbowed its way up from open mics and crowded basements, gathering good will along the way. Mindelle, Rousoulis, and Blu’s slaphappy brainchild has an avid following, and I’m pretty sure there were more than a few TiStaníques in the crowd the night I was there. I do know for certain that the woman one row in front of me to the right was living her best life — on the GIF scale, she stayed pretty much between “Surprise Party” Kristen Wiig and Get Him to the Greek Jonah Hill. This review is dedicated to her. May we all find someone to love us the way this woman loves Titaníque.

While Becky is the catalyst for the play’s chain reaction — and Brewer nimbly inhabits the charged space between exploited and exploiter — it’s the seemingly impenetrable Max who is at last cracked open. Ehrenreich is superb in the role, as unafraid to be horrid as he eventually is to be broken. In a quintet of fine performances, his stands out in this moment so removed from when Becky Shaw debuted (2008 was not bursting at the seams with essays on our crisis of masculinity). “You are a rich man who puts his family in a two-star hotel,” Susan snaps at Max. “That’s what you are.” That may be part of what he is, but Ehrenreich makes clear that the miserable truth of Max is that he’s not really a man at all. He’s a boy who’s been taught that power will save him.

Watching Moss-Bachrach, who can lead with his chest when he wants to, skulk in the shadows, so sad and sullen and aloof, keeping an uneasy eye on Sonny the way a frightened child monitors a parent, I wondered what it would feel like for him and Bernthal to swap parts. Flip a coin at each performance to see who’s the light and who’s the dark. For all the mess and muddle we find them in, the protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon balance and care for one another. The play in turn makes us care for them, out there in all their recklessness on the edge of the night. In doing so, it still serves as a reminder that love, too, is political.

Despite Henley’s effort to collage snippets of Darger’s writing into some kind of arc — here delivered by the show’s solo actor, John Kelly, a prolific East Village performance artist in the 1980s — the material continuously pushes back at its shapers. It doesn’t really want to be a play, at least not in the conventional sense. Watching Kelly shuffle from typewriter to windowsill to mantelpiece on Neil Patel’s cluttered tenement diorama of a set, I kept wishing we were anywhere other than a theater.

There was a moment late in Giant when I realized I could feel my own heartbeat, cranked up with anxiety. The waters the real Dahl waded into were boiling then and haven’t dropped a degree since. “Roald has spent years, long before I knew him, supporting desperate people, children especially, around the world,” Liccy protests to Jessie in a moment alone together. “Lebanon broke his heart.” Part of what gives Giant such voltage in a present context has to do not simply with what’s still happening in Gaza, but also with the phenomenon, much on display these days, of how a thinking person can break morally bad. Any trajectory away from humanity includes multiple moments of doubling down — forks in the road where the uglier path was taken. We dig our heels in; then, before we know it, we’ve dug our own grave.

It can feel heartless to accept the offer of this kind of confessional art-making with anything less than reverential sympathy. But that’s the issue right there: For all the Bengsons’ outward focus on freedom (“Every performance of My Joy Is Heavy has a relaxed house,” Abigail tells us before the show, “which means you can do whatever is good for your body and nervous system”), there is a role we’re expected to play here, a narrow — if supposedly transcendent — emotional exchange toward which we’re being steered. When the Bengsons tell us to open our metaphorical hymnbooks to whatever page, we’re meant to kneel or stand or bow our heads accordingly. There may be moments when the formula succeeds, just as there are moments during a church service where something true and bright can come of the prescribed practice. But what there isn’t is room for questions, and I left My Joy Is Heavy with plenty.

But what about your marriage?! I hear you holler. Well, we met in the college library. He lent me Twilight and I lent him Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (We were into YA, I guess.) He took me to meet his parents, who seemed great — they played and sang jazz around the piano. His mother was bright and funny and dramatic, though I know that’s only one side of her, and I saw how scared he was for her. I proposed (I know!). People threw confetti at our wedding, and his dad made a wonderful toast. And this is the potential of Every Brilliant Thing: Though it can stray into PSA territory, you can never really resent it because then a shy-seeming, silver-haired stranger stands up and actually starts to cry as he tells you and Daniel Radcliffe how much he loves you and how beautiful you are together. In its essence, it’s a play about presence and attention, about how really noticing the world might just be what saves us.

Even as individual moments of Cold War Choir Practice continued to charm me, I kept wondering what exactly was preventing me from getting swept up all the way. Part of my stuckness, I think, sprung from Afsoon Pajoufar’s set, which situates the whole play inside the architecture of the roller rink.

Given such a bleak view out our own windows, it’s bracing to see a playwright like Anna Ziegler take on one of the old tragedies with the most staying power. In Ziegler’s shudderingly intense Antigone (this play I read in high school), directed with assertive spareness by Tyne Rafaeli, a diffident present-day narrator named Dicey (Celia Keenan-Bolger) starts things off by admitting that she’s felt unable to shake the heroine of Sophocles’s play ever since tenth-grade English.

These dissections and alienations produce the kind of rush you get in looking down from the top of a very tall building after you’ve forgotten for a while that you’re not on solid ground: They can be exhilarating and nauseating all at once. It’s a spiritual dizziness that My Dinner With André provokes in mostly mild, frequently very funny ways. By contrast, Gregory and Shawn’s new project, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, uses similar techniques to compose something still full of humor but much darker.

Lee gives the tirade all the TNT it needs: It’s funny and it blows up in our faces. That’s clearly the balance Chinese Republicans wants to strike as a whole, but even as Iris stands surefooted, the play itself is still teetering.

Maybe being a mom means, in part, always being behind, never quite catching up. Time becomes more soup than arrow, more palimpsest than progress. I often feel old and sore and busted and also simultaneously adolescent and clueless, a child recklessly, optimistically playing house. “I don’t know what I’m doing / I don’t know what will happen / But I know what I know,” sing the actors at the end of Meat Suit. All of them are mothers themselves — which, in this business, in this world, is its own small revolution. “I see you,” they sang, and whatever else I felt, I knew they meant it. I see them, too.

I’ve written before about the potential trap of the “cool story” bio-play, and the good news is that Marcel on the Train is stylish and thoughtful enough to avoid the standard pitfalls. Only occasionally does it give off a whiff of Life Is Beautiful mawkishness. For the most part, it makes a good-faith effort to be wiser and wryer about the tenuousness of living and the spiritual utility of art.

Stephens’s script attempts to envision death in order to pay homage to life, but neither great mystery feels freshly illuminated by a project that invests so little in actual presence, actual vigor. When An Ark was done, a hesitation preceded dutiful applause. The woman beside me joined in but turned to her friend with a short, uncertain laugh. “What,” she asked, “are we clapping for?”

The performance is forceful enough for this Bug to operate chiefly as a character study. Despite the cesspits of ­conspiracy-think that pollute contemporary politics, the specific paranoia of Letts’s ­characters — bugs under the skin, brainwashing, ­nefarious doctors in government labs — feels less blazingly relevant than comparatively quaint. At the same time, because Cromer and his designers opt to keep the audience at a remove from Peter and Agnes’s folie à deux, the monsters they behold don’t ever truly spook us. They are shadows­ only, never claws and flesh. In such a production, the fantasy at the story’s center can’t become contagious. We bear witness to two sad, mad people. We don’t question our own sanity.

That stuff’s all right there, both on the page and vibrating in the performances. At the same time, there’s a refreshing lack of attention being drawn to it here. Perhaps it’s a function of letting celebrity alone to do the work of getting butts in seats (across from Williams, an absolutely feral Tom Sturridge plays Anna’s love interest, the Irish ship’s stoker Matt Burke), but whatever it is, it feels like a shift in the winds of our preoccupation with relevancy. There’s not even a director’s note in the program — just a company of artists trusting in the richness and strangeness of the story they’ve undertaken. Watching them forgo protestations of their own necessity, I felt braced, even a little giddy — like Anna standing on the deck of Chris’s barge, her shoulders dropping in the mists of Provincetown harbor: “I love this fog! Honest! … It makes me feel clean — out here — ’s if I’d taken a bath.”

In our present reality, with the floodwaters of AI slop licking at the rolled cuffs of our pants, it’s a pretty sure bet that Second Stage’s elegant revival of Harrison’s play will be applauded for its (then) prescience and (now) timeliness. Yet watching Marjorie Prime — staged on Lee Jellinek’s set of crisp angles, with its green hues engineered for tranquility, by Anne Kauffman, who directs with spare, delicate rigor, as if she’s conducting Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel — I kept waiting to feel … well, more. More rapt, more heartbroken, more rattled by the harrowing questions presented by the long, slow, terribly seductive suicide humanity seems bent on carrying out via technology. Harrison is a formidable craftsman and Marjorie Prime is built very well, but in a way it resembles one of its own artificial humans: It’s an extremely palatable version of the thing. It has studied how to be a play, and it’s a good one — if only the feeling of study weren’t quite so palpable in that goodness. If only it didn’t place so much value on the neatness of its own construction.

The director Matthew Warchus swathes the production in flourishes, many of them at least partly charming: a galaxy of warm, twinkling lanterns suspended above the stage; a preshow in which the company plays carols and tosses cookies and clementines to the audience; showers of brightly lit foamy snow that will actually melt on your face. But there’s no disguising Thorne’s limp, self-satisfied script, which feels less magical than simplistically Freudian. A Christmas therapist’s couch.

Initiative is stitched through with moments like these, like colorful patches on a heavy pall, little saving throws against the dark. Depending on when you were born and how much time you’ve spent rolling dice in basements, it might take you back, but its real achievement, bracing and compassionate, lies in its encouragement to keep walking forward.

Chess is not a serious musical. Fine. Good, even! When the show is at its best, it hits levels of unironic ludicrousness that are more fun than most things on Broadway. Back in 1988 Frank Rich ripped Chess’s American premiere a new one: ‘The characters,’ he wrote in the Times, ‘yell at one another to rock music.’ Yes, they absolutely do. And I had a great time.

It’s a shame, because this Oedipus, when it tries a little less hard, is also full of potency. Manville and Strong crackle together — their chemistry is steamy and genuine and, in some of the production’s best moments, after all terrible secrets have been revealed, so is their body-wracking devastation. These heights arrive at the crux of the breakless two-hour play, after Oedipus (Strong) has been engaged in his bullheaded pursuit of the truth for some time. (“Your honesty fetish is going to pull everything apart,” snarls one of his allies.) Here, Sophocles’s king is figured as a people’s politician, holed up at his campaign headquarters on election night with his family and key staff, awaiting news of what’s sure to be his landslide victory. (Elected to what? Icke never likes to get down to terms, but the implication is president or prime minister, with more than a splash of supreme leader.)

That’s why it’s refreshing to come across a play like Preston Max Allen’s Caroline, the assured, affecting three-hander now getting its premiere at MCC under the emblematically thoughtful and ungilded direction of David Cromer. Allen is writing about something that’s in our newsfeeds daily, but crucially, that thing doesn’t flatten or predetermine his people. What he’s actually interested in are relationships, the interconnectedness of messy human beings. His characters are grappling with the consequences of broken trust and the agonizing question of how much we can truly protect anyone we love. The political resonance of his project arises not from an explicit statement of values but from a tender demonstration of complex, undeniable humanity.

The tempo of Punch slows and the performances sharpen and deepen. Though the air is thick with anguish, three people start to grope their way through it toward each other. One can only imagine that these were the scenes that made Graham want to write the play. They are its finest and—in a moment where truth and reconciliation can feel like utopian fantasies—its most radically hopeful.

Because the production feels too cool (in more ways than one), its hottest performance leaps out like a firecracker set off in a Soho boutique: Brandon Dirden’s superlative Pozzo. Once per act, a second duo crashes in on Didi and Gogo, providing the tramps’ power balance with a lurid, distended foil. Pozzo is a histrionic slave-driver, Lucky his abused chattel who speaks only once, spewing forth a churning flood of half-thoughts, broken refrains, and dire imagery — a mind shattered, perhaps by direct violence, perhaps simply by the daily assault of living on “this bitch of an earth.”

Reza, though, doesn’t get into it, apart from making some easy jabs at “conceptual art” and “deconstruction” and the chichi gallery world. These things aren’t legitimate concerns but coat hooks on which to hang generic contention and an overall icky view of human nature — which is why some of the play’s actually funniest stuff, in both writing and performance, occurs in a frantic two-page monologue delivered by Yvan, who hurtles into Serge’s apartment mid-meltdown over complications with his upcoming wedding. Corden makes big, broad, breathless work of the set piece, eventually crash-landing in a chair to well-earned applause. It works because it’s played well but also because it has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Neither does anything else, but at least here, the disregard is genuine.