Redwood

I finally caught up with Tina Landau and Kate Diaz's new musical Redwood, which is largely a star vehicle for the incomparable Idina Menzel.

Menzel, who also co-conceived the show with Landau, plays Jesse, a successful gallery owner whose life went off the rails after the death of her son. Driving westward, she finds herself in a redwood forest that is being studied by two botanists. She soon talks them into letting her climb one of the massive trees with them.

In many ways, though, the star of the show is the set, designed by Jason Ardizzone-West with projections by Hana S. Kim. Though we don't see live actors interacting with the projections in quite the same way as we did in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Moby-Dick, the projections are impressive, and when part of the set revolves to become a massive redwood, the audience is entranced.

Much of the fun of the show involves watching actors climbing the tree and spinning through the air while suspended by ropes and a harness. Gradually, while climbing, Jesse deals with her grief as she also connects with nature. When fires threaten the forest, things heat up emotionally as well, and the show hastens toward its inevitable but still satisfying conclusion.

The show is slated to run through August 17th. I don't imagine it will be able to continue without Menzel in the starring role, so if you want to see it, make sure to catch it before then.

Academic Criticism on Armstrong

Not long ago, I received an email asking me if I'd written a play about Delia Bacon. The person had heard about it through the website Academia.edu.

It turns out, an academic scholar had published a paper analyzing my play The True Author... Revealed. Natalia Vysotska, a professor at Kyiv National Linguistic University, wrote a paper called "'I Am Not a Freak!' Delia Bacon as a Dramatis Persona" that appeared in American and European Studies 2017, which is published by Minsk State Linguistic University.

The paper cites this blog, as well as my play, which appears in The Best American Short Plays: 2008-2010. Katherine Harte-DeCoux has appeared in the one-act play at a couple of different venues in New York, and the piece also had a student production in Ottawa. It portrays Delia Bacon giving an imagined lecture at the U.S. Consulate in Liverpool, arguing that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon.

Vysotska correctly writes that the aim of the play is "not to take part in the long-lasting authorship debate" concerning the plays of Shakespeare. Rather, the piece "urges us to see the Bacon phenomenon not merely as a historical curiosity, still another 'mad woman in the attic', but as a dramatic figure at the intersection of cultural, gender, and power relations in the mid-19th c. USA going through crucial transformations."

It's gratifying to see my play analyzed in an academic paper, particularly one that also cites Nathanial Hawthorne and the renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. If you'd like to read the play, you can order a copy of the collection it appears in here.

Coming to Western Springs

I'm very excited that my play After an Earlier Incident is being workshopped May 1st through 4th at the Theatre of Western Springs outside of Chicago.

In the play, a recently widowed woman meets a perpetually awkward man for a first date. Things start off badly and quickly get worse, as both of them try to cope with recent traumas that lie just below the surface.

Edward M. Pinkowski is directing the show, which features actors Tommy Aldis and Katarina Creedon. The piece goes up with The Voodoo Man by Carl Maronich and Yalu River by Nan Gatewood Satter. Admission is free, though donations will be gladly accepted.

The Theatre of Western Springs workshopped the one-act version of my play The Love Songs of Brooklynites back in 2019. Vivid Stages later did a reading of the full play in Summit, New Jersey, but it has yet to have a full production.

If you're in the Chicago area for the first weekend of May, I hope you'll come out to see After an Earlier Incident. Performances will be at 8:00pm on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then at 2:30pm and 7:30pm on Sunday.

The theatre is located at 4384, Hampton Avenue in Western Springs, Illinois. Maybe I'll see you there!

Irishtown

Last night I saw Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's play Irishtown at Irish Repertory Theatre. As you might guess, the play was trying to be a little... well... Irish.

But what does it mean to be an Irish play? If a play is Irish, is it not taken for granted that the play is depressing, deals with the legacy of colonialism, involves alcoholism, and ends unhappily?

It is precisely these types of stereotypes that Smyth's play seeks to interrogate. Like Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, it does so by presenting a backstage look at the rehearsals of an "important" Broadway-bound new play. As with Trouble in Mind, we don't see much of the play they are rehearsing, but from what we do see, it looks pretty dreadful.

Place to the side for a moment the fact that no play in 2025 is going to be rehearsed by a small, Dublin-based theatre company with plans to immediately transfer it to Broadway based on nothing other than the strength of a single other work by the playwright. The purpose here is not believability, but rather to use as many cliches as possible to keep the audience laughing.

Brenda Meaney plays Aisling, the Irish dramatist whose new play is curiously set in England with no explicitly Irish characters. The work is to star Siofra, played by Saoirse-Monica Jones of Derry Girls fame. Siofra has won the Dublin theatre's "Best Newcomer" award twice--ten years apart. Yes, this is a depiction of the drama world that is all-too-familiar, as is the fact that Aisling has to claim the play is autobiographical, since otherwise she will be denied the chance to depict a situation in which she has no lived experience.

Or does she? The play involves sexual harassment and assault, and soon the play's English director Poppy, played by Angela Reed, is crossing lines right and left, particularly regarding Siofra, who probably slept with Aisling just to get the part. The two other cast members, Constance and Quin (played by Kate Burton and Kevin Oliver Lynch), stay out of this sexualized mess, but certainly aren't above gossiping about it.

When Aisling decides to pull the rights to her show, the cast tries to devise an Irish play, leading to spoofs of Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Casey, John Millington Synge, and pretty much the entire Irish dramatic canon.

If you're interested in seeing the show, it's playing now until May 25.

Bunbury Players

Bunbury Players in Clifton Park (outside of Albany) are set to present a workshop of one of my plays this weekend.

Due to some recent events, I'm not sure if I'll be able to get up there to see it myself, which is massively disappointing, but if you're in the area, please come.

The play, After an Earlier Incident, is being presented with three other short works at the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Public Library at 475 Moe Rd. Performances will be at 7pm on March 28th and 29th, and at 2pm on March 30th.

The Jew of Malta

I hadn't planned on seeing Red Bull Theater's reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, but when my friend Susan told me she had an extra ticket, how could I resist?

Matthew Rauch starred as Barabas, the titular character who might have influenced not just William Shakespeare's Shylock, but also a slew of villains from Aaron the Moor to Richard III to Iago.

Like Shylock, Barabas is a victim of unfair treatment, but his quest for revenge goes outside the bounds of what can be considered reasonable. At the beginning of the play he is stripped of all his possessions by Ferneze, the Governor of Malta. Ferneze was played in the reading by Derek Smith, who gave a memorable performance as Lodovico in Red Bull's previous production of the John Webster tragedy The White Devil.

While Barabas and Ferenze give unflattering depictions of leaders of the Jewish and Christian worlds, the Islamic world is represented by Selim-Calymath, the son of the Ottoman Emperor. While Marlowe doesn't make any of these leaders come off very well, I found Calymath to be the least odious, at least as portrayed by Jason Bowen, who was excellent a couple of years ago in Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy.

By far, however, the most sympathetic character is Barabas's daughter Abigail, played by Priyanka Kedia. Her father first forces her to become a nun so that she can retrieve a treasure hidden in a convent, then makes her the center of a love triangle that kills two young men, including Ferneze's son Don Lodowick, played by Samuel Adams. Distraught, Abigail converts to Christianity so she can enter a convent for real, earning the scorn of her father.

Barabas's partner in crime (who later foolishly betrays him) is a slave from Thrace named Ithamore. Steven Boyer, who is perhaps best known for playing an emotionally disturbed teenager with a penchant for puppetry in the Robert Askins play Hand to God, was delightfully evil in the reading as Ithamore.

The play, which had its first recorded performance in 1592, is famous for its use of a cauldron in which the protagonist is boiled alive. Philip Henslowe's prop list for the Lord Admiral's Men listed a cauldron that was likely used in the play's premiere and subsequent revivals.

Red Bull is not slated to revive the play in a full production anytime soon, but they will be presenting a new adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid beginning this May. It's on my list of things to see!

Wine in the Wilderness

I first encountered Alice Childress's play Wine in the Wilderness in a student production at City College. Since then. I've taught the play in a variety of theatre history courses.

When Classic Stage Company announced they would be doing an Off-Broadway production of the piece directed by LaChanze, who had recently starred in Childress's Trouble in Mind on Broadway, I knew I'd have to see it.

For one reason or another, that production kept getting delayed, but it is now playing at CSC on 13th Street, and you should definitely check it out. Beautifully directed and compellingly acted, the play continues to speak to audiences today just as when it first aired in 1969.

Yes, aired: the drama was first staged for television as part of a series of plays presented by the Public television station WGBH in Boston. Since then, however, it's become a bit of a classic on regular stages. The Lynn F. Angelson Theater where it's playing now is far from a traditional TV studio, instead wrapping the audience around three sides of its elongated playing area. The set, designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, works like a charm, though.

The action of the play takes place in the apartment of Bill Jameson, a divorced artist living in Harlem  where the year is 1964 and a riot is going on outside in the streets. Jameson is more concerned with his paintings, though, and gets excited when his friends call him to say they've found the perfect model for a piece he's been trying to finish. He's played by Grantham Coleman, who came to audiences' attention in 2019 in Much Ado About Nothing and made his Broadway debut later that year in The Great Society.

I enjoyed Coleman's performance, but the real star of the show is Tommy Marie, played by Olivia Washington in this production. Appearing in a mismatched outfit and a bad wig, Tommy is a source of amusement for the other characters at the beginning, but by the end of the play they (and the audience) begin to see her differently.

Other strong performances are delivered by Brooks Brantley, Lakisha May, and Milton Craig Nealy. The show is only playing through April 13th, so see it while you still can.