Pershing Square Signature Center

[Note: The main review below is for the 2022 production of Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. The update is for the show's 2025 encore run at the Signature Theatre.] Update:  I was nervous about revisiting Oratorio for Living Things, Heather Christian's singular and sonorous exploration of existence. What if Signature Theatre Company's remounting of Ars Nova's 2022 sensation didn't match my memories? I needn't have worried: This musical masterwork by the newly minted MacArthur genius is designed for repeated viewings. In sequences of meticulously curated cacophony that give way to glorious, enthralling harmonies, it offers a multitude of wonders and interpretations. You could see it again and again and again and come away with a different understanding at each performance. Aside from a few new singers and musicians, little beyond the venue has changed. A significant portion of the text is in Latin, and librettos are no longer handed out—audiences were absconding with them—so you can no longer follow along. But that's just as well, because Christian's creation demands full engagement. The more you let go of trying to make sense of it all, the more you'll be rewarded as the show grapples with unanswerable questions about how we spend our all-too-short time in the universe. Oratorio for Living Things remains a magnificent use of 90 minutes of that time. Original review:  Heather Christian's divine Oratorio for Living Things welcomes you to worship. To call this...

Three couples from different generations navigate ther changing seas of modern love and marriage in an original comedy by Anne Marilyn Lucas. The play debuted at Theater for the New City last year under the title Party?; this new incarnation, directed by Matt Gehring, stars Audrey Heffernan Meyer,  Alan Ceppos, Pamela Shaw, Molly Chiffer, Brian Mason and Atlantic Theater Company pillar Jordan Lage. 

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo In the 1925 court case United States v. Cartozian, the U.S. government sued to revoke the citizenship of a man named Tatos Cartozian, on the grounds that Armenians like him weren’t white. The Armenian-American playwright Talene Monahon has now worked that story into Meet the Cartozians, a sprawling, fascinating work of historical fiction that examines ethnicity, history and family legacy.  Monahon’s century-jumping play begins in 1923—not long after the Armenian genocide during World War I—in a stately Oregon home where the Cartozians’ high-priced lawyer, Wallace McCamant (Will Brill), is meeting with the family: Tatos (Nael Nacer, wonderfully reserved), his proper daughter (Tamara Sevunts, excellent), his boisterous son (Raffi Barsoumian) and his judgmental mother (the incomparable Andrea Martin, whose first line, “Mmhmm,” nearly brings down the house). McCamant has found anthropologists who will trace the Armenians’ origins to the Caucasus mountains (“the origins of the white race”) and praise “to the terrific tendency of Armenians to intermingle and procreate with white populations all over the world.” McCamant also plans to bring in “excellent Armenians” from the East Coast, who have light blue eyes and speak perfect English: “These folks have married into society. They belong to golf clubs, their children attend good schools.” That strategy may seem ludicrous today—not to mention troubling—but with citizenship at stake, does it...