Things to do in New York this Saturday

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (this play i read in high school), the Chorus has an uncanny encounter with a teenage girl on an airplane. This Chorus is nicknamed Dicey, and is played with perforated steeliness by Celia Keenan-Bolger; the girl, a student played by Susannah Perkins, is reading Antigone, Sophocles’s tragedy of protest and punishment in ancient Thebes. Antigone’s behavior in the face of punishment has haunted Dicey throughout her life: an implicit spirit of reproach to her own lack of courage. She finds herself explaining, she says, “how literary characters can stalk you sometimes.”  Antigone (this play i read in high school) | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The sense of being shadowed by Antigone may feel familiar to New York theatergoers. Variations on her story are everywhere now. She was a side character in Robert Icke’s Oedipus on Broadway; Alexander Zeldin's modern British take on her, The Other Place, just closed at the Shed, but Jean Anouilh’s 1944 version is at the Flea and Barbara Barclay’s Antigone in Analysis begins next week at La MaMa. The challenge resides in finding ways to adapt a 2,500–year-old tragedy—in which Antigone’s cause relates to the burial of her disgraced brother—to modern purposes. The girl on the plane, for one, is unimpressed with the Sophocles original. “Is it even about her?” she complains with with insouciant directness. “It seems like it’s all about her brother’s body. A man’s body.” Dicey,...

Theater review by Raven Snook If you feel stressed and overworked, the members of the Australian performance collective Pony Cam can relate. Burnout Paradise is their way of transforming the Sisyphean hamster wheel of modern life into exhilarating entertainment. As an onstage clock ticks down, four athletic actors—some of them noticeably injured—attempt to complete a series of tasks while running on treadmills. Their assignments range from the everyday (shaving, waxing, shampooing) to the much more ambitious (performing Shakespeare, filling out a grant application, cooking a three-course meal). Straining to do it all, they depend on audience volunteers to help out by retrieving stray tomatoes, playing bingo, shooting hoops, even dancing at an impromptu rave. Burnout Paradise | Photograph: Courtesy Austin Ruffer On paper, Burnout Paradise may seem like a show that, as though on a treadmill itself, is fated to go nowhere. But in practice, it is both an amusing indictment of our soul-crushing go-go-go ethos and a gleeful conjuring of community. Those who choose to take part in the challenges seem to have a blast; even just watching, you find yourself surprisingly invested in the ever-mounting chaos. Organized into four 12-minute rounds, the show has the electric suspense of a sporting event: Will the performers complete their assignments and beat their record mileage before the buzzer sounds? If they don't, you can ask for a full refund, though it’s hard to imagine you’ll...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Christmas is just around the corner, and Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers), a 10-year-old Black girl in 1987, has a modest wish list for Santa: “I want a Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” None of these is likely to be provided by her financially strapped single father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther who owns a roller rink in the south side of Syracuse, New York. But through her participation in a children’s choir called the Seedlings of Peace, Meek has started writing to a Soviet stranger. (“War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”) And her pen pal in the Urals soon sends Meek a very special Speak + Spell: one that not only teaches her the Russian translations of useful terms like “revolution” and “armageddon” and “government official,” but also recruits her into a scheme that may affect upcoming disarmament talks between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Spasibo, comrade!  Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova That’s just a taste of the mayhem wrought by the playwright and composer Ro Reddick in Cold War Choir Practice, an offbeat dark comedy that may be set in the 1980s but whose genre-fluid blend of surrealist humor, satirical songs and looming menace recalls the 1970s plays of John Guare. Reddick’s brand of ridiculous, though, adds a current of racial conflict, as reflected in the tense relationship...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The titular heroine of Petite Rouge dances with wolves aplenty in Company XIV’s latest neoburlesque spectacle, but don’t worry for her safety: She’s as voracious a predator as any of them. Director-choreographer Austin McCormick and his Brooklyn company have a penchant for twisting classic children’s stories into naughty ones for adults, fashioning baroque extravaganzas out of such tales as the Nutcracker, Cinderella, Snow White and Alice in Wonderland. This latest pageant gives a decadent spin to the adventures of Little Red Riding Hood through a decadent mélange of slinky dance, explosive live singing and suggestive circus acts. This little lady knows her way around a basket. Petite Rouge | Photograph: Courtesy Deneka Peniston Like all Company XIV shows, Petite Rouge unfolds as a series of vignettes performed by a troupe of versatile performers in outrageous costumes by Zane Pihlström, who has also designed the louche, ruched set in a panhistorically rococo spirit. The aesthetic is femme-forward and playfully queer-flavored; the men may have lupine masks on their heads, but they are also often dolled out in corsets and heels (and, in one case, tasseled pasties on each buttock). Among the attractions provided by the men are a triple aerial act, a toe dance and a comical turn by PhillVonAwesome, in mask, as Petite Rouge’s grandma.  Related: See more photos from Petite Rouge. Petite Rouge | Photograph: Courtesy Deneka Peniston But...

Theater review by Adam Feldman  The talk in Clare Barron’s icky, tender, gorgeous You Got Older is sometimes so small it nearly vanishes completely. Alia Shawkat plays Mae, a youngish lawyer whose life is in ruins—she has lost her job, her apartment and her boyfriend in one fell swoop—and who has moved back to rural Washington to spend time with her father (Peter Friedman). Between awkward pauses in the play’s opening scene, they discuss gardening, toothbrushes, sleeping arrangements; what they don’t discuss is his recent cancer diagnosis. You Got Older is less about disease than about the unease that surrounds it, and it beautifully captures elusive things about avoidance: It’s about the denial of death, but also the denial of living. You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin You Got Older mostly unfolds as well-observed comedy that often ventures into morbid territory. When Mae and her siblings—blunt older sister Hannah (a hilarious Nadine Malouf), amorphous middle brother Matthew (Misha Brooks) and excitable youngest sister Jenny (Nina White)—gather around their dad’s hospital bed, they spend their visit bickering, teasing and commiserating about the off-putting family odor they share: “Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg.” A similar sense of bodily dysfunction informs the flirtation between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate she encounters at a local bar; she shares details of her painful rash, and he reveals that he is into that sort...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  [Note: Jinkx Monsoon plays the role of Mary Todd Lincoln through September 30, joined by new cast members Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Urie and Jenn Harris. Jane Krakowski assumes the central role on October 14.] Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride. Escola has earned a cult reputation as a sly comedic genius in their dazzling solo performances (Help! I’m Stuck!) and on TV shows like At Home with Amy Sedaris, Difficult People and Search Party. But Oh, Mary!, their first full-length play, may surprise even longtime fans. In this hilariously anachronistic historical burlesque, Escola plays—who else?—Mary Todd Lincoln, in the weeks leading up to her husband’s assassination. Boozy, vicious and miserable, the unstable and outrageously contrary Mary is oblivious to the Civil War and hell-bent on achieving stardom as—what else?—a cabaret singer.      Oh,...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  The story of Chess dates back to the 1980s, and so do the efforts to fix it. This overheated Cold War musical, by lyricist Tim Rice and ABBA songsmiths Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, began as a 1984 concept album (which yielded the unlikely radio hit “One Night in Bangkok”). But its original London production was a mess, and its 1988 Broadway incarnation, which framed the songs in a completely new book, closed in under two months. The script has been reworked countless times since then, as different writers keep moving its pieces around, trying to solve the large set of Chess problems. None have cracked it yet, and the show’s latest revisal, with yet another completely new book, inspires little hope that anyone will.  Chess | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy “No one’s way of life is threatened by a flop,” sings the chorus in what is now the show’s opening number, and while that sentiment has a ring of wishful thinking here, it does speak to a certain strain of showtune culture. Many musicals that are not initially successful attract passionate fandoms—perhaps all the more passionate for their underdog spirit—and subsequent versions of such shows are sometimes markedly better (like the recent revival of Merrily We Roll Along or the charming current production of The Baker’s Wife). That is not the case with Chess. The production at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, has plenty of good moves. Memorable and tuneful...

Theater review by Raven SnookLibby Carr's achingly humane Calf Scramble is set in a sweltering barn where the cattle aren’t the only ones feeling penned in. Five teenage girls in Huntsville, Texas, are competing to win prize money by raising calves for their Future Farmers of America projects in 2007. The confident Vivvy (Marvelyn Ramirez), bred on a ranch, is the group’s de facto leader; her happy acolytes include the sassy preacher's daughter Anna Lee (Ferin Bergen), the ultra-devout Maren (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) and the accommodating El (Gabriela Veciana). But El's ambitious and overcommitted bestie, Sofi (Elisa Tarquinio), isn't so easily corralled. Calf Scramble | Photograph: Courtesy James Leynse On Cate McCrae's woodchip-strewn set, cooled by four industrial fans, the girls bond and bicker (sometimes over liquor) as they tend to their heifers and haltingly discuss their faith, relationships and futures. Religion and prison rule their insular and conservative community, where everyone seems connected to an inmate or a corrections officer. The headstrong Sofi hopes that winning the calf contest could be her ticket out, but her cohorts have more domestic dreams, even the ones who are too scared to reveal their authentic selves for fear of the town's wrath. In a powerful piece of double casting, the five performers also play the calves. Guided by Caitlin Sullivan's assured direction and Hannah Garner's expressive movement, they fluidly transform from wranglers to...

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  How well do you know Sean Hayes? You probably think of him as a master of broad comedy, as he demonstrated in 11 seasons as Jack on Will & Grace (and as Jerry in Martin and Lewis and Larry in The Three Stooges). Maybe you enjoy his good-natured enthusiasm on the podcast Smartless. Maybe you saw him quip, scowl and play classical piano in his Tony-winning portrayal of Oscar Levant in Broadway’s Good Night, Oscar. Even so, you might still be surprised by how well he plays a basically regular guy in The Unknown: Elliott, a somewhat isolated, somewhat depressed, mostly sober middle-aged writer who has been having a hard time devising a screenplay, perhaps because his own life has so little drama.   David Cale’s one-man play whips some up for him. While clearing his head at a rural retreat, Elliott hears someone singing a love song about romantic disappointment—a song that Elliott wrote years earlier for a musical. When he returns to the city, a seemingly chance encounter with a handsome Texan at a West Village gay bar leads to a growing fear that he is being shadowed by a marginal figure from his past—and/or, perhaps, by that man’s identical twin. On Hayes’s old sitcom, this scenario might have been played for laughs: Jack and the Bein’ Stalked. Instead, it spirals into a dark-hued exploration of obsession and the porous line that separates life from art.  The Unknown | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid Elliott's journey, however, doesn’t...

During the Obama Adminstration, Julissa Reynoso served as a key advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Caribbean and Central Americas issues; she went on to serve as Ambassador to Uruguay and, under Biden, to Spain. Her experience forms the basis of this autobiographical drama, co-written with Michael J. Chepiga, which makes a case for the value of diplomacy, foreign aid and public service. The highly experienced Doug Hughes (Translations) directs the Public Theater's world premiere production. Zabryna Guevara, as Reynoso, leads a cast of eight that also includes Dan Domingues and Marinda Anderson as oither real-life State Department figures and Barbara Walsh as the wife of an American man imprisoned in Cuba.