How I Learned to Drive Written by Paula Vogel Directed by Mark Vogel Manhattan Theatre Club March 31, 2022 Production website 💉💉 out of 5.
I just didn’t get this play. I just didn’t get it. I know that this is Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play and I know that the dream team of Mary-Louise Parker (Proof) and Tony nominee David Morse (The Iceman Cometh) were the perfect performers for the story but I just didn’t get it. I appreciated the skill of the playwright in building this sexual assault from its small simple beginning to its conclusion. The creepiness of the relationship between this adult man and girl was palpable. I appreciated the effects of a family that has no boundaries – how it abandons every member and opens the door to all kinds of demons. BUT what was the girl after?
This Space Between Us Written by Peter Gil-Sheridan Directed by Jonathan Silverstein Keen Company – Theatre Row March 26, 2022 Production website 💉💉 out of 5.
This play was exactly what I expected – – in fact it was a bit too much of what I expected. This Space Between Us tells the story of a corporate lawyer who is connected to his parents, aunt, neighbor and boyfriend, who one day wakes up to realize that his corporate law job – although lucrative – is not making the change in the world that he feels necessary. He wants to ditch it all and head to Africa to help others.
Flying Over Sunset Book by James Lapine Music by Tom Kitt Lyrics by Michael Korie Direction by James Lapine Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont December 31, 2021 Production website 💉💉 out of 5.
It was a perfect New Year’s Eve. I was lucky and scored tickets in the first row right to the side of the stage next to the step down into the audience. The seat was comfortable, plenty of leg room and NO chatty neighbors! Heaven! The musical, Flying Over Sunset was quite an adventure. The brief program note bears repeating,
In the 1950’s the drug LSD was legal, but generally it was only experimented with by a small number of people either under the radar or in a clinical setting. Flying Over Sunset is a work of fiction inspired by the extraordinary lives of Aldous Huxley, Claire Boothe Luce, Cary Grant, and Gerald Heard, all of whom experimented with the drug. We know that the famed author and philosopher Aldous Huxley’s first experience with LSD began when he stopped at a new Rexall drug store in Los Angeles on what was to be a quick errand. He was with his wife Maria and an old friend Gerald Heard. WE know that playwright Congresswoman and Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce first experienced the drug in the garden of her Ridgefield, Connecticut, estate with Gerald Heard serving as her guide. We know that at his wife’s urging, the movie star Cary Grant went to her psychiatrist’s office to find out more about this miraculous drug she dept urging him to try. Flying Over Sunset connects the dots.
Chicken and Biscuits Written by Douglas Lyons Directed by Zhailon Livingston Circle in the Square October 16, 2021 Production website 💉💉 out of 5.
I love a good silly comedy but I just didn’t love this play. Ala a Tyler Perry movie, there is a funeral of the family patriarch and everyone is drawn home for the service. This, of course, sets out an avalanche of family dysfunctions and dancing skeletons in the closet. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? It was all so forced and so predictable. The acting was so big and so forced that they missed many moments that could have used some subtlety. Michael Uhrie as the token white guy in the play was truly hilarours. His timing was perfect and he could make the most out of the smallest of moments. He was almost worth the price of admission. The rest of the cast seemed to depend on attitudes in place of character development and stereotypes at the cost of originality. I do have a problem with stage plays that would have made a better TV show. I am not sure what Chicken and Biscuits had that demanded live theatre.
A Thousand Ways – Part 1: A Phone Call Written/Directed by 600 Highwaymen Public Theatre June 13, 2021 Production website 💉💉 out of 5
Let me begin by saying that this really isn’t theatre in that it lacks one essential ingredient – an audience. This makes Thousand Ways an experience and not technically theatre. But at this point in theatre’s resurgence, I’ll take ANYTHING! The premise is interesting: everything happens with a phone call to a total stranger that remains a stranger throughout. Once your $15 dollar ticket is purchased, you are given a day, a time and a code to dial. When that time comes and you enter the code an pre-recorded electronic voice patches you through to another random person. From there the most mechanical voice asks you to share things with your partner ranging from serious to silly and to do all kinds of imagined fantasies as to what this person must look like and what their habits might be.
