Regina Robbins

Theater of War Productions has brought classical drama to some very tense and sometimes dangerous places: Rikers Island, Guantánamo Bay, Fukushima. Using texts that range from the ancient Greeks to modern writers such as Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, the New York City–based company engages audiences that are coping with trauma, such as veterans, the incarcerated and survivors of natural disasters. But artistic director Bryan Doerries hesitated when he was approached about taking his troupe to Missouri in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s 2014 death, which sparked days of civil unrest. “Nothing intimidated me more than the idea of going to Ferguson,” Doerries says. The resulting production, Antigone in Ferguson, premiered there in 2016 and has since traveled nationally and globally. It’s been seen by New York audiences, too, but only in brief engagements. (A one-night staging last year at a basketball court in Brooklyn drew more than a thousand people.) If you missed those performances, now may be your chance: Starting on September 13, Antigone in Ferguson will run at Harlem Stage for five weeks. All tickets are free, and Theater of War Productions is making sure the house is full every night. “We’re sending transportation to pick people up, and we’re providing dinner for them,” says Doerries. “We’re trying to reverse the flow of culture.”  “We’re trying to reverse the flow of culture." Before black teenager Brown was killed by a white police officer, Doerries says, h

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Blind since infancy, the title character of Brian Friel’s 1994 drama Molly Sweeney is a self-sufficient, well-liked woman living a quiet life in Northern Ireland. That changes when she meets and marries a man with a passion for self-improvement who wonders if Molly’s sight can be restored. At his insistence, she meets with a renowned eye doctor who advises surgery. The chances of success may be slim, he reasons, but it’s surely worth a shot. After all, what does she have to lose? Molly Sweeney is the fourth and final play in Irish Rep’s season-long tribute to Friel, who is perhaps best known for his 1990 work Dancing at Lughnasa. Its structure is deceptively simple: The three characters deliver monologues about the same series of events but never interact. Molly (Sarah Street) is positioned between her doctor, Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), and her husband, Frank (a masterly John Keating), who instinctively dislike each other but find common cause in their mission to give Molly her sight back. Conditioned from childhood to be a people-pleaser, Molly lacks the self-assurance that might allow her to resist these two men, whose desire to bring her into the seeing world is tangled up with their feelings about what they’ve done, or haven’t done, with their own lives. Director Charlotte Moore has applied a feather-light touch to this production, trusting Friel’s subtle yet multi-layered writing to do most of the work. The result is eminently watchable,

Broadway review by Regina Robbins Broadway has been catching up with the News this season. The smoky-voiced, harmonica-playing Huey Lewis and his band racked up a dozen top-10 singles in the U.S. between 1982 and 1991, one of which—“The Power of Love”—was featured in 1985’s biggest movie, Back to the Future. A musical adaptation of that time-travel classic, which has been giving Broadway audiences a nostalgia fix since last summer, includes it alongside another song from the movie, “Back in Time.” Both songs are now also featured in The Heart of Rock and Roll, which goes all in on Lewis, using his catalog—singles and deep cuts, plus one song written for the show—to transport us to a hot-pink version of the 1980s, cheerfully unbesmirched by the Cold War, AIDS or cocaine. At a cardboard packaging company in Milwaukee, Bobby (Corey Cott) is a would-be rocker turned working stiff who channels his ambition into a 9-to-5 job. (Cue “Hip to Be Square.”) Determined to succeed at something, anything—unlike his father, a musician who died years ago—he’s gunning for promotion to the sales team. Also trying to prove herself is the boss’s daughter, Cassandra (McKenzie Kurtz), a Princeton grad who crunches numbers but aspires to impress her father (John Dossett) in a leadership role. They may both get their chance at a trade convention in Chicago, where Owen Fjord (Orville Mendoza), a hotshot Swedish furniture mogul, will be the keynote speaker; making a deal with him would give the compan

Broadway review by Regina Robbins  When the women’s-rights activist Alice Paul, the central figure of Shaina Taub’s musical Suffs, starts planning a march down Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, a fellow protester volunteers to ride a white horse at the head of the procession. Paul and others are skeptical: With everything else on their plates, who has time to find a horse? But when the day arrives, their comrade does lead the demonstration astride a white steed—an amusing and historically accurate flourish in an otherwise earnest scene. This early triumph for the suffragists, however, is followed by a steep uphill climb toward the passage of the 19th Amendment. Their struggle is compounded by political and personal conflicts among women divided by age, race and class; alliances are strained, friendships are tested and blood is spilled for the cause of equality. When the curtain comes down for intermission, the returning image of that young woman on horseback may now put a lump in your throat. Suffs | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus After premiering at the Public Theatre in 2022, Suffs now marches to Broadway with its intrepid director, Leigh Silverman, still leading the way, and most of its principal cast intact: Writer-composer-lyricist Taub makes her Broadway debut as Paul; the invaluable Jenn Colella is Carrie Chapman Catt, the reigning grande dame of the suffrage movement, and Nikki M. James is the civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells. These p

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia unfolds across two timelines. In the early 19th century, a Cambridge graduate works as a tutor on an English country estate, overseeing the education of a precocious young lady; nearly two centuries later, in the same house, three scholars seek to unravel mysteries left unsolved in the past. Among the subjects it surveys are mathematics, physics, history and music, and these interests are not merely academic; they are directly related to the play’s structure and plot. Real talk: This isn't a carefree evening at the theater. It is, however, a balm to the soul as much as a workout for the brain, and its current Off Broadway revival reminds us why this 1993 play about what’s lost to time has, so far, proven timeless. Bedlam, a small but mighty ensemble company that reinvigorates the classics by ruthlessly reconstructing them, gets high marks for this production. As usual, director Eric Tucker lets the audience see the theatrical gears turning, staging the action on a set (by John McDermott) that erodes both the boundary between past and present and the one that separates performers from the audience. Yet he keeps the strands of the story from becoming a confusing tangle, which is no mean feat considering how much Stoppard puts on our plates: Regency Era sexual liaisons, modern-day professional rivalries (complicated by sex) and glorious questions about science, art and the meaning of life. The playwright has cultivated thi

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Hansol Jung’s Merry Me is a ribald comic paean to lust. The pointedly named Shane Horne (Esco Jouléy) is a Navy lieutenant who delights in providing pleasure to any and every woman on base, including her commanding officer’s wife; but while Shane gives other women their “merries,” she’s unable to find her own. Aided and abetted by her therapist and former lover, Dr. Jess O’Nope (Marinda Anderson), she embarks on a quest for her elusive big O. The laughs, at least, come nearly non-stop, with help from madcap performances, silly props and loads upon loads of sex. Merry Me’s structure is both deliberately formulaic—repurposing the 17th-century framework of Restoration Comedy as a celebration of queer sexual liberation—and gleefully anarchic: ignoring the fourth wall, blurring the lines between the actors and the characters they play, and cramming in more literary and pop-cultural references than you can shake a vibrator at. Our narrator and guide is an Angel (Shaunette Renée Wilson), relocated from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America plays, who has eight vaginas, plus…other equipment. Shane’s journey even makes a stop in classical Greece when she encounters the dewy young Sapph (Nicole Villamil), who is newly married to Pvt. Willy Memnon (Ryan Spahn), the hapless son of the army’s top general.  Despite all these blasts from the past—the works of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf also make appearances—Merry Me lives very much in the present, and marks

Review by Regina Robbins  Betty Smith wasn’t going to let a good name go to waste. Though she’s known almost exclusively today as the author of the best-selling 1941 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith was also a prolific playwright, and a character called Francie Nolan appeared in a script that won her a prestigious prize but was never produced; when she turned from drama to prose a decade later, Smith recycled the name, and the rest is literary history. Now the Mint Theater Company brings that unseen 1931 play, Becomes a Woman, to the stage. The production, directed by Britt Berke, demonstrates that while the first Francie has plenty in common with the second, she isn’t likely to supplant her in popular esteem. Like Smith herself, both Francies are girls from poor families in early-20th-century Brooklyn, blessed with artistic talent and dreaming of easier, brighter futures. In Becomes a Woman, our young heroine (Emma Pfitzer Price) works at the sheet music counter of a five-and-dime store, singing songs available for purchase and attracting plenty of unwanted attention from would-be boyfriends. “Don’t men ever think about anything but a date?” she wonders, rebuffing all advances. Francie changes her tune when she meets Leonard (Peterson Townsend), a handsome, fashionable charmer who happens to be the boss’s son. Despite its meet-cute beginning, this cross-class romance leads to disaster, but Francie is able to rally with the help of Tessie (Gina Daniels), a coworker who k

Theater review by Regina Robbins Although it may well be the most famous work by a Black playwright, A Raisin in the Sun has spent a lot of time in the shade. Its original 1959 Broadway production, starring Sidney Poitier, ran for more than a year, but Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking drama did not return to the Great White way until 2004, with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs in the Poitier role; by then, what was once a contemporary portrait of an African-American family crushed by past and present racism had become a bit of a period piece. A second brief Broadway revival followed in 2014, headlined this time by Denzel Washington. Now the Public Theater has brought Raisin back for yet another look in a well-acted and agonizingly relevant production that makes the magnitude of Hansberry’s achievement crystal clear.  New York stage legend Tonya Pinkins anchors the production as family matriarch Lena Younger, who has to decide what to do with an insurance payout after her husband’s death. Should it be invested in the entrepreneurial dreams of her son, Walter (Francois Battiste), who is desperate to provide more for his exhausted wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), and their young child? Or would it be better spent on the education of her daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert), whose ambition is a source of both pride and unease?  Director Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy) has spent most of his career staging and sometimes writing new plays, and he approaches this classic with fresh eyes. Poitier’s charis

Theater review by Regina Robbins In the Southern Breeze takes its title from “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching protest song made famous by Billie Holiday, and the specter of racist bloodshed haunts Mansa Ra’s new drama. Alone in his apartment, isolated by the coronavirus pandemic and his own anxiety, an unnamed Black man (Allan K. Washington) ponders whether such brutality is inescapable and whether, if so, he just should cut to the chase: “It is bad that sometimes I just want to rush the process?” he asks, imagining slipping his own neck into the noose. As he wrestles with his choice, mysterious figures from the distant and not-so-distant past appear: Black men running from danger or toward liberation, from shackles both literal and figurative. Despite their common goals, they engage one another warily, their well-founded fears as likely to drive a wedge between them as to bind them together. It’s a tantalizing setup, but director Christopher D. Betts hasn’t found a coherent tone for the piece; moments that reach for absurdism sometimes land as uneasy comedy, and the play’s resolution feels unearned. That’s a shame, because Ra’s writing is, at its best, thoughtful and poetic. Clocking in at just over an hour, In the Southern Breeze is only slightly longer than a group-therapy session, and in many ways it functions like one, with its characters modeling connection and catharsis. One suspects that a well-meaning desire to bring of-the-moment plays to the stage as quickly as p

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Questioned about his odd last name, the antihero of Will Eno’s Gnit shrugs and replies, “It’s a typo…but we decided to just go with it.” That no-big-deal energy is prevalent throughout Eno’s new play, whose characters grapple with the biggest of big questions—What is love? Is there a God? What is my purpose?—with almost pathological nonchalance, to both mournful and hilarious effect. Gnit is a reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a verse epic based on Norwegian folklore and the playwright’s own tortured family life. For audience members who know the source text, Eno’s take will be a hoot; for those who don’t, it might well seem like a strange, jaunty trip through random dramatic tropes. Eno hews closely to Ibsen’s plot, following the self-absorbed protagonist, Peter (Joe Curnutte), as he leaves the miserable home he shares with his despairing mother (Deborah Hedwall), becomes a fugitive, recklessly woos several women and flees his homeland for exotic adventures abroad. There are a number of 21st-century updates—flirty dairy maids are now a trio of DTF grad students—but the play also keeps one foot in a simpler, semi-magical Scandinavian past, complete with trolls. Eno’s more substantial innovation is to substitute a deceptively breezy absurdism  for Ibsen’s romantic grandiosity. Director and frequent Eno collaborator Oliver Butler has cracked the code on the playwright’s comedies of existential dread; he expertly steers Gnit’s cast of six t

Theater review by Regina Robbins  Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die puts the most inescapable fact of human existence—and the very thing we spend the most time trying to escape—right there in the title. First performed in 2011 by the playwright herself as an intimate, partly autobiographical rock cabaret at Joe’s Pub (and later at Lincoln Center’s Clare Tow Theater), the show has now returned on a bigger stage, with Janelle McDermoth taking Lee’s place as the Singer. Staged by the up-and-coming choreographer Raja Feather Kelly in his directorial debut, We’re Gonna Die is set in what is normally a very depressing modern locale: a waiting room. But the space, equipped with an antique snack machine and retro plastic chairs, is bathed in soothing pink and purple light, and its inhabitants happen to be the members of an impossibly cool, casually diverse band. Without fanfare, the Singer picks up a mic and starts telling stories about moments in life when she may have felt like she wanted to die, from childhood frenemy drama to romantic disappointment to family tragedy. These episodes lead to musical numbers that put a positive spin on the trauma, either through humor (“If we got old / And we were strong and healthy / We wouldn’t wanna die! Oh no!”) or solidarity with others coping with existential anxiety—which, after all, is everyone. The show’s simplicity is its greatest innovation; its rejection of traditional notions of character and plot is of a piece with its general skeptici

Theater review by Regina Robbins  The cast of Zawe Ashton’s for all the women who thought they were  Mad comprises six black women, a black girl and one white man, and it’s the outsize influence of that one male figure—sometimes a boss, sometimes an amorous coworker or a concerned medical professional—that drives the drama. The play revolves around the ambitious Joy (Bisserat Tseggai), an African-born woman living in a western nation. Wholly focused on her corporate career, she is beginning to crack under the pressure of innumerable daily humiliations, from backhanded compliments about her hair to people barging into her office without knocking. The other women onstage confer about how to help her if it isn’t too late. Could their collective power counteract the toxic environment in which Joy finds herself trapped? “We speak with one voice or not at all,” declares the motherly Margaret (Sharon Hope). It turns out that’s not so easy. Actor-playwright Ashton, who is currently appearing on Broadway in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, weaves her poetic text around an all-too-realistic scenario that slowly evolves into a full-on fever dream. Past, present and future converge as Joy finds memories of her mother country intruding on her thoughts—and sometimes her body—while she tries to prepare for a crucial business meeting. The other women try to throw her a lifeline, offering various forms of black female solidarity, but Joy stubbornly clings to her professional identity: sexless, child

Theater review by Regina Robbins Can George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, an old play about even older events, still make audiences laugh and think in the 21st century? Its plot centers on the relationship between an aging man and the teenage girl he “mentors,” and it unapologetically insists that the dissemination of classical culture and philosophy throughout the Roman Empire was, on balance, a good thing for the conquered. One scene features a prisoner of war declaring, “Only as Caesar’s slave have I found real freedom,” which is roughly the opposite of woke. But Shaw—who was, for the record, a fervent believer in socialism, vegetarianism and equal rights for women—had no use for moral or political absolutism; every radical idea in Caesar and Cleopatra is tempered by a profound cynicism about human nature. The friction produced is reliably funny and frequently poignant. In Shaw’s conception, Cleopatra (Teresa Avia Lim) is not the cunning seductress of legend but a credulous, high-spirited teenager with no parents, cared for and controlled—barely—by a stern nursemaid called Ftatateeta (Brenda Braxton). Caesar (Robert Cuccioli) finds her hiding from her enemies, including her own younger brother, in the Syrian desert; at first, he doesn’t believe her when she tells him she really is the queen of Egypt. But once he’s convinced, he sees great potential in the royal teen and, like a proto–Henry Higgins, sets out to prepare her to assume the throne. Cleopatra isn’t sure

The Fringe is dead. Long live the Fringe! After celebrating its 20th birthday in 2016, the New York International Fringe Festival decided to skip 2017 altogether, like a college student taking a gap year to gain some perspective. Now the annual showcase is back—with some major changes. It comes to us in cool October instead of sweltering August, and it has slimmed down from more than 200 shows to fewer than 90. Instead of occupying existing downtown venues, the festival is using unconventional spaces in the West Village that have never served as theaters before; audiences meet at the Fringe Hub at 685 Washington Street and are guided to the shows from there. (The Fringe has also embraced the outer boroughs, inviting companies outside Manhattan to join the new Bring Your Own Venue wing of the festival.) Even with fewer shows to choose from, however, navigating the Fringe can be daunting. The festival offers a head-spinning array of options, and the most exciting thing about it—wading into a sea of little-known artists—can also be its biggest challenge. Here are a few of the best bets. Go forth and Fringe, New Yorkers! 1. The Classical You’ll see familiar plots and characters at the Fringe, but they’ll have a unique spin. For example, Makbet shakes up Shakespeare by having actors switch roles mid-performance. There’s also the queer-themed Starcrossed, in which Mercutio and Tybalt replace Romeo and Juliet as the cursed couple; a kid-friendly version of The Odyssey; and AntiCone,

Jelani Alladin wasn’t expecting much when he auditioned for Frozen. “I assumed the powers that be would cast it as they did the movie,” he says—that is, with all white actors. To his surprise, the African-American Alladin is now making his Broadway debut as the lovable Kristoff. “I don’t take it lightly and will never take it for granted,” he says. So, is this story a one-off or a sign that the theater world really wants to be more diverse? By one standard—Tony nominations—this year looks better than last year. In 2017, only half of the eight acting categories included nominees of color (none of whom won), seemingly a step backward from 2016, when the cast of Hamilton all but swept the musical awards. This year, every one of those categories includes minority actors—one of whom, Children of a Lesser God’s Lauren Ridloff, is also deaf. RECOMMENDED: Complete guide to the Tony Awards Broadway producers created more opportunity for representation this season, too, by giving us Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, the Middle East–set musical The Band’s Visit and a revival of the Caribbean-themed Once on This Island. Plays were less fruitful, though revivals of Angels in America, Lobby Hero and M. Butterfly provided a few choice roles for black and Asian actors. John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons provided a choice role for—who else?—John Leguizamo. A number of actors of color also scored in roles that usually go to white actors. Some got there partly through star power, like D