Playwrights Horizons

Theater review by Adam Feldman  In his program note for The Dinosaurs, playwright Jacob Perkins describes how a support group for alcoholics helped him deal with traumatic memories—including that of being surrounded by a group of men to be “exorcised,” at the age of 8, from a homosexuality that had already become legible to others. In the weekly sessions he attended in a church basement, which have now inspired his elegantly elliptical and tender new play, Perkins also found a community of people wrestling with demons: drawing on one another’s strength to stay cleansed of the spirits, whether liquid or figurative, that once controlled them and which still threaten, at any moment, to slip into their weakest places.  The Dinosaurs | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes This theme becomes explicit only once in The Dinosaurs: When Joan (Elizabeth Marvel), speaking of the mysterious maladies she suffered as a child, compares herself to “that little girl in The Exorcist after she gets possessed by the devil.” Her illnesses were harbingers of her future alcoholism, she later realized, but at that time “my disease was manifesting as restlessness, irritability, discontentedness”—problems that later, frustrated by her inability to control them, she would turn to drinking to escape. Perkins approaches alcoholism not as a physical ailment but a spiritual one. “I didn’t believe that God saw me, that God could ever wanna take care of a person like me,” Joan says, but the community of...

The Bushwick Starr collaborated with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company last year to present the world premiere of an unusual work by writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his lovely drama Public Obscenities. Playwrights Horizons is bringing it back this spring for another spin. The show explores his connections to his physicist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty—including through their shared loved of music—as well as the gaps between their scientific and artistic approaches to the world. Chowdury's mother helped create the piece, and performs it alongside him.