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.  

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. 

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.