Art of Leaving Written by Anne Marilyn Lucas Directed by Matt Gehring Pershing Square Signature Center October 10, 2025 Production website. ☠️ out of 5. Total Poison
Let me begin by saying this is the WORST NIGHT OF THEATRE THAT I HAVE SEEN IN YEARS! I absolutely adore the Signature Theatre in New York and recognize that they rent out their space to other theatre companies which is admirable, but I have no idea what went wrong here. I spent the first few moments wondering if I was being punked – – that this was some kind of bad community theatre making a mockery of the worst script with the worst acting. I couldn’t find anything to applaud. I have found many a high school production that could leave this in the dust.
Krapp’s Last Tape Written by Samuel Beckett Directed by Vicky Featherstone NYU Skirball October 8, 2025 Production website 💉💉💉 out of 5.
I made a huge mistake with seeing Krapp’s Last Tape and I really should have learned my lesson by now. I forgot somehow that when you see Beckett, you really need to sit right up close – no matter what the cost. Whether it is Godot or Endgame or Happy Days you are going to see little movement and most of the play is going to happen on the actor’s face and body. It is NOT the time to scrimp on ticket cost. What made it worse this time, the theatre, Skirball at NYU, is built like a roadhouse where the back rows are really far back. And this man spent most of the time at his desk with his tape recorder AND he had a big mop of hair that shadowed much of his face.
Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God Written by Jen Tullock and Frank Winters Performed by Jen Tullock Directed by Jared Mezzocchi Peter Jay Sharp Theater October 7, 2025 Production website 💉💉💉 out of 5.
Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God is a one woman show written and featuring Jen Tullock (known for her work on television’s Perry Mason and Severance). The play which is loosely based on her life follows a popular essayist, known for her biting condemnations of modern Christianity, who releases a book detailing her upbringing as a gay kid in the evangelical south. She is soon confronted by the subject of one of her stories, the woman she fell in love with on a Christian mission trip to Poland eighteen years earlier, who claims the stories are false. We, the audience, are then left the dilemma of how much of the trauma that she is sharing from the book that she is sharing is actual truth and how much is simply false memory trying to fill in the gaps in her past. A central theme in the play is the effect of trauma on memory – can you – or should you believe everything coming out of the victim’s mouth. Does trauma and pain create “false memories”?
Caroline Written by Preston Max Allen Directed by David Cromer MCC Theatre October 5, 2025 Production website 💉💉💉 out of 5
Caroline is a story of three generations of women as they navigate intense and complex mother-daughter bonds. At the center of the drama is the doting and determined, single mother Maddie who is taking her 9-year-old-daughter Caroline out of an obviously dangerous home situation (Caroline’s broken arm in a cast is our clue). Mom and daughter are working their way through greasy spoons and car rides to arrive at Maddie’s parents’ home in Illinois. Grandma welcomes the pair, but with bountiful caution. Her last interaction with her daughter Maddie was 10 years and $70,000 ago – – long before Maddie was a mom or even sober.
Oratorio for Living Things Written by Heather Christian Directed by Lee Sunday Evans Signature Theatre October 4, 2025 Production website 💉💉💉💉💉 out of 5.
Heather Christian has written truly a divine experience in her Oratorio for Living Things. It truly feels like more of a call to worship than any piece of theatre than I have ever experienced. It is really impossible to define but I will do my best. It is a classical choral masterwork infused with pop, blues and gospel. A dozen stunning vocalists and six incredible instrumentalists make sense and aural spectacle out of Christian’s composition of this rich poetic text. Because the lyrics are dense and can be difficult to parse (some parts are in Latin, sometimes it builds into cacophony) they even hand out hymnals out at the entrance to the theatre to follow along with the language, but I quickly put it back down on my lap as I didn’t want any one of my senses to miss the experience.
