Public Theater

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,...

Old secrets and resentments get dug up as four squabbling Korean-American sisters—played by Tina Chilip, Christine Heesun Hwang, Laura Sohn and Shannon Tyo—meet up in Orange County to perform a ritual in honor of their late father. Mei Ann Teo directs the world premiere of Jeena Yi's debut play for Ma-Yi Theater Company, which is currently in residence at the Public.  

Theater review by Tim Teeman  At the very start of Public Charge, a 6-year-old Julissa Reynoso tries to leave her native Dominican Republic in 1981 to join her mother in the Bronx. But a consular officer has other ideas: The Public Charge Proviso, he points out, stipulates that the sponsor of a person coming to the U.S. must possess “sufficient financial resources” that her mother does not possess. This key moment from Reynoso’s life—a collision between emotion and bureaucracy—implies a promising theme for Public Charge, Reynoso’s autobiographical drama (co-written with Michael J. Chepiga) about a political crisis that she had to solve as a senior diplomat in the Obama Administration. But the play seems to misrecognize the potential of its own opening scene. It tables the emotion to focus on the bureaucracy. Public Charge | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus The play’s main story begins in 2009, when Reynoso—now a Harvard-educated lawyer, and played with brisk charm by Zabryna Guevara—begins working in Hilary Clinton’s State Department. It goes on to depict what Reynoso may see as the crowning achievement of her five-year stint at State: the complex negotiations that led to the release from a Cuban prison of an American aid worker named Alan Gross. (The Cubans wanted America to release prisoners in return.) It’s a hostage crisis of sorts, but without the tension and high stakes that term implies; the tone is dry and administrative.  Public Charge | Photograph: Courtesy...

Russian expat Alexander Molochnikov, who moved to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, directs Eli Rarey's dark comedy—inspired by real events—about a Russian director who moves to New York in 2022 after speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, only to find that America is not quite as welcoming as he'd hoped. Molochnikov is also billed as the creator of the piece, which was part of the Under the Radar festival last year and returns now for as a Public offering.