Launched by Josh Short, the Wilbury Theatre’s founder and artistic director more than a dozen years ago, FRINGE PVD aims to provide Providence-area creatives with a platform to share their work. Typically, fringe festivals exist outside of the confines of extreme curation. And in the past, shared Niki Healy, the Wilbury’s director of communications and advancement, the FRINGE PVD was an unjuried, two-week-long festival. Recently, they’ve shifted to slightly more curation and shortened the festival—with the first shows “Phoneral” and “Got Beef?” starting tonight—to one week due to funding.

Still, there’s quite a line-up for art lovers to witness and participate in, from Emma Platt’s “4 Girls Who Grew Up,” to “Isolation Lake” and “Rasputin II: Bring Back the Groove.”

During the submission period, Healy said, the FRINGE PVD typically receives applications from theater makers that include only one or two sentences about the show. So, making decisions about which productions to include comes from—at least partly— existing relationships or word of mouth.

“Platt, who wrote “4 Girls Who Grew Up,” worked with us for the past three years, I believe, as an intern for Fringe and as a stage manager,” Healy said. She added that Platt was also in a Wilbury production called “Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight.”

Platt’s one-act play centers on four female characters who delve into their childhoods, their traumas, and how their experiences have shaped them.

Kit Grindeland, the force behind the 2024 Fringe show “Rasputin, LIVE!” is another creative the Wilbury has an existing relationship with. Grindeland, also a ceramicist, is back this year with “Rasputin II: Bring Back the Groove.”

“Kit brings an amazing energy,” Healy said.

The 2024 show “was super raunchy, and they were just so committed to the character of Rasputin throughout the whole fringe experience,” she added.

At the opening night party, “everyone has 60 seconds to pitch their fringe show. Kit came in full [Grigori] Rasputin [in 2024]” and [was in character as] full Rasputin the whole entire party,” Healy explained.

In this year’s production, “Rasputin II: Bring Back the Groove,” Rasputin has lost his groove. And using “silent film, comfort food, crowd-sourced therapy and more,” according to the description, Rasputin and friends are trying to bring it back. But what the showrunner wants to know is “Will you come and boogie?” If you do, leave the kids at home due to the show’s graphic nature.

For showgoers looking to be part of the action and don’t mind donning a bathing suit, Polina Volfovich’s “Isolation Lake” at the Steel Yard is a possibility.

“It takes place in a sauna, so it’s limited to nine people. You go into the sauna for 15 minutes, you come out of the sauna, take a cold shower, go back into the sauna, and that’s when a performance happens,” she said.

The comedy focuses on “pandemic-era bed rotting, online isolation and Moomin-esque folklore,” according to the show’s description. It also promises to be an intimate experience.

Each “Isolation Lake” performance lasts about forty minutes and requires a signed waiver.

There are many other genre-pushing shows to choose from, including the “Coffee Cantata,” combining classical music, clowning and film projections, “Motorboat” with dance, improv and cake, and “Kissy Face,” in which women get their faces removed, Healy said. “Kissy Face,” in which Healy will perform, is described as “a freak show of the rituals, contortions, and animal work of making yourself up.”

For those who missed the opening night party and aren’t sure what to see when, here’s a link to the schedule for FRINGE PVD. It’s also posted below.

Summer is one of our favorite seasons.

It’s sunny, hot and full of theater. This July, we’re excited about what local companies have in store. We’ve picked several highly-anticipated shows that could jump-start your summer theatergoing. There’s Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” that details a relationship full of broken-hearts and deception, “A New Era,” centering the Black feminist movement of the 1890s in Boston, and the classic Shakespearean tale, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” You can also look out for a queer-themed new musical set in Provincetown, a paranormal thriller headed to Broadway, and a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.”

‘Prize Fight’

Harbor Stage Company, Wellfleet, Mass.

Through July 11

Tickets: www.HarborStage.org

Playwright and actress Brenda Withers, one of the leaders and cofounders of the scrappy, critically-acclaimed Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet, has demonstrated a penchant for penning unsettling, absurdist-tinged tales, such as “The Ding Dongs” and the dinner party drama “Dindin,” that tap into the disorienting elements of “The Twilight Zone” crossed with the menacing, sinister qualities of Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Caryl Churchill, in which the commonplace becomes nightmarish. But her new drama no doubt reflects her own intimate experience and fascination with that age-old debate of art versus commerce. As a young theater-maker, she spent a few unhappy years in Hollywood after her play celebrity satire, “Matt and Ben,” cowritten and costarring her friend Mindy Kaling, became a downtown theater sensation in New York in 2003. In “Prize Fight,” an animated, thought-provoking debate erupts between an uncompromising author who wants to refuse a prominent writing award and her silver-tongued agent, who tries to convince her to choose prestige over principle, accolades over artistic integrity.

‘The Great Gatsby’

Citizens Opera House, presented by Broadway in Boston

July 7-19

Tickets: www.BroadwayinBoston.com

For such a famously slim novel, running just 200 pages, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated “The Great Gatsby” is one of the most multivalent and thematically rich texts in the literary canon. More than 100 years after the book first came out, a slew of “Gatsby” adaptations have hit stages in recent years, with the rights to the landmark novel entering the public domain in 2021. There was the dynamic “Gatsby: An American Myth,” with electrifying songs by Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine and direction by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin, that premiered at the ART two years ago and grappled with the class issues and illusions about the American Dream at the center of the novel. “Gatz,” from experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service, was an acclaimed word-for-word, marathon adaptation of the novel. A sharp examination of the desire for reinvention, “Gatz” found an office worker starting to read aloud the novel, and his fellow coworkers getting caught up in the spell of bringing the story to life. The current tour of the hit Broadway production of “The Great Gatsby,” presented by Broadway in Boston and featuring music by Massachusetts native Jason Howland, is a more straightforward version that leans heavily into the Jazz Age glitz and glamour. While it only glances at the novel’s deeper themes, it’s not devoid of substance, offering more empathy for Daisy as it explores her lack of choices as a woman and proves poignant as a romantic tragedy of star-crossed lovers.

‘Betrayal’
Gloucester Stage Company

July 9-Aug. 1

Tickets: www.gloucesterstage.com

The examination of a seven-year deception is told in reverse chronology in Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.” In the story, Emma betrays her husband Robert by having a passionate affair with Jerry, her husband’s best friend. Over time, audiences learn how their romantic entanglement came to be and what it costs. The Nobel Prize-winning Pinter wrote the play in 1977, and it was first produced in 1978. The story is semi-autobiographical and was reportedly inspired by Pinter’s own seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell, the wife of Pinter’s best friend Michael Bakewell. At the time, Pinter was also married. Shana Gozansky directs.

‘Paranormal Activity’

Emerson Colonial Theatre

July 11-30

Tickets: www.emersoncolonialtheatre.org

This chilling stage adaptation of the thriller-horror franchise stops in Boston for a three-week run before it opens on Broadway in August. As with other recent Broadway spectacles like “Stranger Things: First Shadow,” the play offers spellbinding stage illusions and spine-tingling scares, with a white-knuckle immediacy that only live theater can offer. But don’t expect of the franchise’s staples, like the found-footage stylistics, the stories of Katie and Kristi, the sisters seen in the original films, or the horrifying appearances by demon Tobi. Instead, this new ghost story finds a couple, James and Lou, moving from Chicago to London “to escape their past...but they soon discover that places aren’t haunted, people are…” The play’s author Levi Holloway wrote the eerie 2023 Broadway thriller “Grey House,” about a troubled couple stranded during a snowstorm inside a creepy haunted house with four strange, supernatural-seeming girls and their aging female caretaker. Felix Barrett, who co-created Punchdrunk’s immersive theater sensation “Sleep No More,” helms the show. “By treating horror as an art form rather than a cheap set of jump scares, this thrilling new show…proves how jaw-clenchingly, arm-clutchingly frightening horror on stage can be,” pronounced the critic for the Guardian of the current London production.

‘A New Era’
Company One Theatre

Strand Theatre, July 18-Aug. 8

Tickets: www.companyone.org

The Black feminist movement in Boston is at the heart of Miranda Austen ADEkoje’s play “A New Era.” In the narrative, seven women come to Boston for a conference to fight for the liberation of Black people in 1895. This true story — inspired by the activists in the Boston-based Woman’s Era Club of the 1890s — centers Black women, often marginalized in feminist and civil rights movements, who played pivotal roles in creating change while fighting for desegregation, equal rights and freedom. The new play was commissioned and developed for the National Park Service by Plays in Place, as part of the Suffrage in Black & White series where three plays anchored in historic spaces dig into the city’s abolition and suffrage movements. Summer L. Williams will direct.

‘The Jack of Hearts Club’

Provincetown Theater

July 16-September 6

Tickets: www.provincetowntheater.org

If you’ve ever spent time in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, you know what a special place it can be, especially as a longtime haven for the LGBTQ community. The brainchild of P-town piano man Jon Richardson, who wrote the script and composed the score, this homegrown world premiere musical was inspired by Richardson’s interest in the town’s rich queer and trans history and became a big hit last fall in Provincetown. The story centers on a ragtag group of friends who gather every summer inside the celebratory confines of the titular Jack of Hearts Club. At the end of the summer of 1963, this chosen family of “friends, lovers, mothers and divas prepare to toast the end of the season” with their annual “So Long, Summer” cabaret bash, with each of the characters finding themselves “at a significant crossroads in their lives.” While Provincetown had long been a refuge for the marginalized queer community, in the 1960s gays and lesbians were under threat from the town’s moralists and the local vice squad, so the show opens up a fascinating window into a bygone era of pre-Stonewall gay history. “Provincetown has always been a haven for people who didn’t fit elsewhere,” Richardson has said. “This show is about that moment in history when queer people found each other, fell in love, and built a world together, even when the larger world told them not to. At its core, it’s about joy, community, and the bravery of belonging.” The original cast recording of “The Jack of Hearts Club” will be available to listen to starting July 17 on all major streaming platforms.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company

Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common, July 22-Aug. 9

Tickets: www.commshakes.org

Four lovers run away to an enchanted forest in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where magical creatures and others meddle in their affairs. In Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s version, the action takes place in a neon-lit festival instead of the woods, but the drama of being ripped apart by others remains. Desire, music, magic, love and community combine in this classic, enduring tale commemorating Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30th year of staging free theater on Boston Common. The show, presented in partnership with the City of Boston, Boston Parks and Recreation and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, will be directed by CSC founding artistic director Steven Maler.

*Some of the shows above originally appeared in an article on WBUR.com here. To read more Summer Theater Picks, click here.

Playwrights don’t usually get treated like rockstars. But Mfonsio Udofia is certainly feeling like one these days. While she was at a recent concert in Boston, some fans of her Ufot Cycle, came up to her to tell her how much they loved her nine-play saga about a Nigerian immigrant family, that they’d seen every one so far, and had tickets to “In Old Age,” the penultimate play in the cycle. That drama, produced by the Front Porch Arts Collective, is being presented by ArtsEmerson at the Paramount Center through June 28.

“As a playwright, that doesn’t happen. It’s absolutely surreal,” says Udofia, who was raised in Southbridge, Massachusetts, in a recent interview. “Most playwrights don’t get to see all of their work produced in this way and still be breathing. So it’s been incredible to see how Boston audiences have said yes to this work and keep coming back and telling me things about my work that I don’t even always know. The buy-in from the city has been extraordinary.”

When the sprawling, decades-spanning Ufot Family Cycle was first ballyhooed to much fanfare at Boston City Hall two years ago, Udofia was gobsmacked then at the scope and ambition of the endeavor, spearheaded by the Huntington theater and its artistic director Loretta Greco, and encompassing some three dozen local arts and cultural organizations. But Udofia is even more stunned now two years into the unprecedented project, in which nearly all nine plays in the multigenerational epic have been produced.

“I always ask myself, are we going to get bored or tired of being with these people?” Udofia says. “And the answer is no. At least Boston is telling me that the answer is no. So that’s a wonderful thing to have learned.”

When she wrote the plays, she designed them so each one could stand alone, and be told in any order, but she says it winds up being “a greater story” if you see all of them. She’s watched as audiences have followed the cycle to different theaters around town, introducing patrons to theaters they’d never gone to before. “It helps with audience sharing, because now you’ve got all of these people who know, say, the Huntington and loved the first two plays, and now they’re hopping over to Central Square Theater or Chuang Stage, because they want to catch the next story.”

Still, the realities of producing all of the plays together, over the course of two years, has been an imposing challenge, because of the resources required to mount such an ambitious project.

“It takes a community coming together for people to really understand the impact of these plays,” she says. “If you want to have the boons of what this can be, then the way to do it is having theaters actually reach across the aisle and talk to each other and come up with a new formula. So one of the biggest surprises is how a community can answer a question of scale.”

There was also the question of producing brand-new plays that had never been done before. The Cycle has featured five world premieres or works-in-progress, including “The Grove,” “Kufre N’ Quay,” “The Ceremony,” “Lifted,” and “Adia and Clora Snatch Joy” (coming to the Huntington next fall).

“In Old Age,” though, was an established play that had already been produced several times before, including in New York and at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, where Greco was artistic director. So when Udofia informed the producers and the show’s director Dawn M. Simmons that she was rewriting the play, they’d be forgiven for some trepidation.

In the two-character “In Old Age,” the Cycle’s matriarch, Abasiama (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), first seen in its origin story “Sojourners,” is now in her 80s. Ensconced in her crumbling house near Worcester, she’s living alone, with her adult children grown and out of the house, and her second husband Disciple having passed on. While that turbulent marriage is in her past, she’s still grappling with the scars of caring for a man whose mental state became increasingly unraveled. Her middle daughter Toyoima, an accomplished academic whose story was the focus of “Lifted” (its work-in-progress readings were seen in March), has hired an aging carpenter, Azell Abernathy (Marvin Bell), to repair and remodel her mother’s crumbling home, still filled with old ghosts. Her one non-negotiable demand: Abasiama must select everything that goes into the house.

“For Abasiama, who has been the pillar of her family and has been kind of going crisis to crisis, the centering of self is actually the hardest thing to do—choosing for herself, when nobody has really asked her to choose before,” Udofia says. “Being an immigrant in America, she has not thought about having a choice for herself. So she’s now put into the position of figuring out her desires in her 80s.”

The original 2019 play, she says, was more of “a haunting.”

As the last play that she was going to be seen in, she adds, she didn’t want it to be about her repeating the cycles of the past. “There was something about putting all the plays together here in Boston where I didn’t want it to be the trauma of the men around her. I wanted it to be her story. I wanted something deeper for her.”

To that end, Udofia has shifted and re-conceived Azell, a cantankerous, spiritual-minded carpenter, and the bond that Abasiama and him create is pivotal. “Azell was more of an antagonist in the past,” she says. In the new version version, “he’s done a lot more work not to be a certain kind of man.”

The play no longer pivots on whether Abasiama can move past the trauma of her experience with Disciple. Instead, Udofia says, “the question that erupts inside the play is: What has my life been, and what do I want for it now? And it’s all because her daughter asked her, ‘What do you want your house to look like?’ Which becomes a question of: What do I want my life to look like now that Disciple is dead?”

Besides “Sojourners,” which the Huntington staged in fall of 2024, Abasiama has also appeared in “The Grove” at the Huntington; “Her Portmanteau,” produced by Central Square Theater and Front Porch; “Kufre N’ Quay” produced by the Boston Arts Academy (in partnership with Wheelock Family Theatre) ; “The Ceremony,” a collaboration between Chuang Stage, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and Boston University; “runboybun” produced as staged readings and a radio play with multiple collaborators; and the work-in-progress “Lifted,” produced by Wellesley Repertory Theatre. Different actors have played Abasiama in each play—Abigail Onwunali (“Sojourners”), Patrice Johnson-Chevannes (“The Grove”), Patrice Jean-Baptiste (“Her Portmanteau”), Jackie Davis (“Kufre and Quay”), Cheryl D. Singleton (“The Ceremony”) and Udofia herself (“runboyrun”).

“The goal was to have as many different Abasiamas as possible, because she’s different throughout her life,” she says. “So you can keep some of the core things about her the same, but let different Black women step inside of her and find more color. It’s been beautiful to watch her evolution and watch what other people bring. My big thing with her is that she has the capacity to grow. I tell all the actors playing her that she’s cut from a cloth that is more sweet than sour. She has to learn how to do the sour or more angry thing, but that’s not her first kick.”

In creating the Ufot Cycle plays, Udofia wanted to share an immigrant story that might surprise some audiences. “I wanted to tell the story of an immigrant family that didn’t necessarily plan to stay in America forever, because I believe the reasons why people come here are complicated, and not all of them are because America is the way, the truth, and the light,” she says. “I wanted to tell the story of immigrants who wanted to go home and make their country better, but who then become a part of the American fabric.”

“So what does it look like when your dream for your country and the dream for the place that you are now residing begins to shift underneath you? It’s like a dream morphed.”

Those feelings then reverberate down into the children of immigrants. “How beautiful it can be for those subsequent generations to go, ‘I’m American, and I am from this other place as well.’ And if you can hold those things to be true and pass that down, that’s part of what actually makes America great.”

Now, the writing of the Ufot Cycle has inspired Udofia to pen a new play, “creation stories and all the important important,” that finds the playwright “weaving her own surprising folktale on the cost of creation and the impossible work of becoming.” Centered on the story of a midlife Black woman “pulled between her many selves,” it will be produced at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in New York starting September 15.

“This is an urtext to the cycle,” she says. “It’s not going to be part of the cycle, but I think it is deeply related to the cycle. It’s the story on how you get the cycle, and it is the closest thing to my actual story and what it took to write it.”

As the series enters the home stretch towards the ninth and final play “Adia and Clora Snatch Joy,” Udofia marvels at how the Boston theater community has come together to mount this project, with the Huntington leading the charge and serving as the “motherboard.” Resource-sharing across cultural organizations has been paramount, especially with multiple co-productions between different theaters.

“You’ve got people going, ‘I can support you with an extra week of rehearsal, because the work is hard and you’re doing one of the complicated ones, so let me subsidize that for you.’ ‘I will have a dramaturgy book ready for you as you start rehearsals.’ ‘Here is what the marketing campaign looks like so you don’t have to think too hard about it, and all of it will cohere.’ ‘Oh, the Boston Arts Academy doesn’t have a box office for ‘Kufre and Quay’? We’ll help you set that up.’

“This wouldn’t have happened in this way if the community didn’t say, ‘We’re going to make it happen.’ “Everybody came to the table and went, ‘This is worth it.’ That doesn’t really happen in the American theater today.”

When the Ufot Cycle was first announced two years ago, Greco told the assembled throng at Boston City Hall that her vision for the project was “to set aloft a big beautiful test balloon for exploring the power and complexity of both collaboration and community activation over time.”

“What does it mean to activate an entire city with a unique diaspora story?” she wondered. “How might our city change in the course of this two year adventure? What visionary artists will feel emboldened to stand on Mfoniso’s shoulders and dream? My hope is that we can create a host of new paradigms that communities across the country can emulate towards making big, messy, aspirational things.”

Indeed, could the success of the Ufot Cycle inspire other cities and regions to attempt similarly ambitious theatrical experiments and community collaborations? “I am hoping so,” Udofia replies. “At the very least, it is the proof that it can be done.”

“In Old Age,” by Mfoniso Udofia, produced by the Front Porch Arts Collective, presented by ArtsEmerson. At: Emerson Paramount Center, through June 28. Tickets: from $55. frontporcharts.org and artsemerson.org

Share

In the Oscar-nominated 2010 psychological thriller “Black Swan,” Natalie Portman’s ballet dancer Nina Sayers does more than lose herself in her art. She loses her mind. After she’s chosen to dance the lead in Tchaikovsky’s celebrated classic “Swan Lake,” Nina grows increasingly obsessive and neurotic, pushed to the brink by a manipulative director to find her more wild and unrestrained side, the black swan that’s the yin to the white swan’s yang. As the pressure mounts, Nina’s mind begins to unravel.

So how do you translate a quintessentially cinematic experience to the stage? That was a key challenge for playwright Jen Silverman, along with composer Dave Malloy (“Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812”) and director and choreographer Sonya Tayeh (“Moulin Rouge! The Musical”), as they adapted “Black Swan” into a new stage musical. The resulting show is now receiving its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, running through July 12.

“Nina’s interiority is the engine of that movie, and I think in many ways it’s also the engine of this musical,” says Silverman in an interview last month on a rehearsal break at the Loeb Drama Center. “But of course it’s a different set of challenges inviting an audience into that interiority when you don’t have the kind of control that a camera has over what they see and when they see it.”

Indeed, director Darren Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique employed specific cinematic techniques—from disorienting hand-held camerawork and looming close-ups to rack-focus blurring and dreamlike, hallucinatory sequences—to capture Nina’s fraying psyche. There were mirrors, windows and reflections of Nina everywhere she turned. As her fears mount that a rival dance, Lily, could usurp her grasp on the role, Nina’s reality and her delusions begin to blur, and she sees fleeting visions of doppelgängers on the street, in the rehearsal studio, and in the person of her burgeoning rival, whose face seems to blur with hers at times.

“[The film] uses the tools of cinema so beautifully to put you deeply inside the psyche of someone. It makes you align yourself with her experience of losing reality, so you too are losing reality,” Silverman says. “And instead of making me pull back and wanting her to stop, I wanted her to go further, and she did. So the movie did something to me that was unexpected and deeply unsettling.”

In adapting the film for the stage, the creators could tap into the synergy of a story that’s “grounded in a world of live performance,” Silverman says. “It was like an invitation to put that onto a stage with bodies in real time, and it felt in some ways so organic and so natural.”

Having written plays like “Witch,” “Spain,” “Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties,” and her much-produced “The Roommate” (seen on Broadway in 2024 with Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow), Silverman says they’ve always been intrigued by stories that are driven by the complex psychology and internal life of its characters, often expressed through subtext.

But in a musical, characters reveal their inner-thoughts and feelings by singing, with the music an expression of their desires, their pain, their longings, their regrets and confusions. With “Black Swan,” Silverman thought about how “music functions as a camera lens in terms of putting you inside someone’s point of view, inside their mind. And dance is also a language of storytelling in the most visceral way,” they said. “So as someone who came up as a downtown playwright and has done a lot of work on [non-musical] plays, I was really interested in the languages of music and dance telling a story alongside the language of a book.”

Indeed, Malloy has created a score that blends Tchaikovsky with a pulsating and entrancing electronic sounds.

The creative team went down a lot of rabbit holes, and Silverman says that Aronofsky and the producers were open to departing from the film in big and small ways. “In those first sets of drafts, we would swing the pendulum so far away from the movie, and then we’d come back toward it, because we’d realize we were losing something the movie did really beautifully.”

Ultimately, the team “preserved the broad strokes of [Nina’s] descent into madness fueled by their unbending determination to dance the role and what it means for them to dance the role at the end,” Silverman says, adding that the musical “diverges from the movie in terms of scope,” because they were able to explore “the constellation of other characters around [Nina]” in more depth.

Nina (Melanie Moore) is still a driven, obsessive young ballerina, infantilized and pushed to her limits by a demanding mother, Barbara (Kate Jennings Grant), who “dreamed of being what her daughter is becoming and is putting the pressure on her daughter, because that dream has to be achieved for both of them.”

Beth (Tory Trowbridge), the ballet company’s aging star ballerina who was played by Winona Ryder on film, gets shunted aside. “She’s about to have not only her career, but her sense of identity stripped from her,” Silverman says. “What are the pressures that come to bear on women artists, especially as you get older inside that very particular frame? And how is Nina’s journey being fed by those pressures, particularly the moments in which reality starts to slip for her?”

Nina is given a chance to play the lead in a reimagined version of “Swan Lake”—with the dual role of a young maiden who’s been turned into swan after a sorcerer casts a spell on her, and her villainous twin who attempts to steal the prince she’s fallen in love with.

In this version, her rival Lily (Jada Simone Clark) is already part of the company and seen as possibly Beth’s successor, and she’s someone that Nina is inextricably drawn towards with a gravitational force. “She’s sort of everything that Nina isn’t,” Silverman says. “She’s charismatic and easygoing and has a lot of friends, and Nina has watched her from afar with longing. There’s a one-sided attraction where it’s like, ‘Do you want that person, or do you want to be that person?’ And it’s hard to tell sometimes. With Nina, we were interested in that longing and in how Lily feeds into Nina’s awakening.”

The trap of perfection, and the slipperiness of that idea, is a dilemma that Nina, Lily, Beth, and all the dancers grapple with. “What does perfection mean, and who defines perfect? And why we care so much to strive for that thing?” Clark wonders.

Perhaps the biggest transformation from the film to stage version is with the ballet company’s Svengali-like artistic director Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel on screen), a psycho-sexual manipulator who messes with Nina’s mind and sexually harasses her. If they had tried to reproduce that character on stage, it would have inevitably become a different story.

In this theatrical version, the LeRoy character has been turned into a female choreographer, Margeaux LeRoy (Amber Iman), who’s recently returned to the company where she trained as a young dancer. “She was sort of a misfit as a student, and now she’s being asked back as a choreographer, so there’s a lot of pressure on her to sort of achieve something big. She comes in from outside and brings with her a new way of moving. She’s adapting ‘Swan Lake’ in a way that’s pushing against the boundaries of tradition.”

As in the movie, Nina’s world is small and cloistered. She’s stuck in the pattern of doing things the same way every day and pushing herself to her limits, but is longing for something more. Her controlling mother strenuously insists that she must dance, rehearse, and behave a certain way if she wants to succeed. The ballet company and its leaders make it clear that she must be a certain kind of dancer to get ahead.

When Margeaux LeRoy arrives on the scene, she’s the spark that ignites a dramatic change in Nina—but it pushes her to the brink and then over the edge. “[LeRoy] comes in from the outside and puts her in touch with her shadow side, her black swan, the instinct and hunger and reckless desire that lives inside of her. And what does that person do when something starts to crack open?”

“Sonya often says that Nina is somebody who’s lived inside a very small space, and then when that space starts to expand, it’s breathtaking for her. But she also has no idea how to put on the brakes.”

To create the dance sequences, Silverman says that Tayeh brings a high-octane, genre-blending dance style that really “pushes the bounds of movement, the body and physicality. So she’s introducing this new vocabulary. We access this shadow side, and it isn’t via the techniques of ballet.”

As in the film, Nina seems to be shadowed and stalked by a doppelgänger, a manifestation of her desperation and encroaching madness, and a performer (Ida Sake) will bring that phantom to life through dance. “The doppelgänger becomes the story of Nina’s shadow side and the moments in which she starts to plug into desire, instinct, hunger, reckless confidence, these things that have been very foreign to her prior to LeRoy coming in and shaking things up,” Silverman says. “When she starts to plug into those, she begins to glimpse her shadow side, and then the shadow side begins to take up more and more of her psyche.”

Doppelgängers allude to and capture the idea of “the duality of the self” and have long been a staple of literature and film—from “Jekyll and Hyde,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.”

“It’s such a potent metaphor for something that is so accessible and so real, all of the ways in which we navigate the world by showing some part of ourselves and restraining some other part,” Silverman says. “These doppelgänger stories capture the ways in which the human capacity for self-discovery is such a gift and such a weapon all in one. There’s always the question of, ‘Do I know who I am, and what happens when I discover something about myself I didn’t know? In many ways, that is Nina’s trajectory.”

`

In a time of venomous social discord, when civic discourse has turned as toxic as a Superfund site and online spaces have become vitriolic cesspools, the fictional private school at the center of Jonathan Spector’s play “Eureka Day” seems like an oasis from all the noise. The school bills itself as a welcoming haven that “holds space” for everyone and invites and respects a range of viewpoints.

But in an effort lead with empathy and do the right thing, these well-meaning, progressive-minded parents and school board members often twist themselves into pretzels. Conversation and language is often reduced to meaningless cant and incomprehensible platitudes that miss the point. Yet lurking beneath all those conflict-avoiding niceties and expressions of values are turbulent emotions and strongly held points-of-view that are straining to emerge.

Playwright Jonathan Spector brilliantly explores these contradictions in “Eureka Day,” his uproariously funny and needle-sharp satire about a vaccination debate that engulfs a progressive-minded private school when a mumps outbreak erupts. The play first premiered in 2018 in Berkeley, California, and landed in New York in 2019, just a few months before the Covid pandemic emerged. With its story of a viral outbreak and vaccination debate more timely than ever, the play was revived on Broadway last season, became a hit with audiences, and won the Tony Award for best revival of a play. The Huntington is now producing the Boston premiere of “Eureka Day” at the Huntington Theatre through June 28.

The play resonates in the current climate not just because of the vaccine arguments, says director Margot Bordelon, but because the toxic online discourse has spilled over into our social and civic spaces. “One of the things that many people find most distressing about being alive right now is how extremely politically divided we’ve become and how a conversation with the opposition doesn’t even feel possible,” Bordelon says. “We’re living in these echo chambers on social media and in our lives. And I think this play encourages people to not turn the other side into monsters, that most people really are trying to do the right thing.”

In the play, the board of the Eureka Day elementary school in Berkeley, California, that bastion of liberalism, is meeting inside the library to discuss a number of issues, including whether to add the term “transracial adoptee” to its drop-down list of options for ethnic identities in registration and application forms. When one parent argues that the school’s Core Operating Principle is that “everyone should Feel Seen by this community,” another parent quickly retorts, “There’s no benefit to Feeling Seen if you’re simultaneously Being Othered, right?”

As the play goes on, this kind of circuitous language and jargon-filled niceties obscure some of the rising tensions and brewing conflicts.

Aging hippie Don (Ken Cheeseman) is the Rumi-reciting head of the school who tries to be a calming presence but is easily flummoxed. The unctuous Suzanne (Nancy Lemenager), a parent at the school since its founding, exudes passive-aggressive politeness. The school is her life, so she’s forceful about how things should be done. Eli (Japhet Balaban), a wealthy former tech startup bro, is now stay-at-home dad who’s still learning the rules of the road at the school and getting his arms around the ever-evolving language. Meiko (Sasha Diamond), quiet but with a wry sense of humor, is a single mom who we learn is having an affair with Eli. Then there’s board newcomer Carina (Eunice Woods), a Black woman with a special needs child and a female partner. The audience stand-in, she keeps her guard up at firsts as she’s still learning the ropes and has yet to be indoctrinated into the sometimes mind-numbing jargon.

The play’s engine really revs up, though, when a mumps outbreak erupts, with more than 100 kids having to quarantine, and the public health agency sends a letter to the school urging parents to get their children vaccinated. While vaccinations hadn’t been required in the past, the board is now considering whether to require them for all the kids as a condition of attending school, which raises the considerable ire of Suzanne and her fellow anti-vax parents.

The poop hits the proverbial fan at an incendiary “community activated conversation,” a livestreamed online meeting with the board members running the meeting from the library and parents at home typing their comments and questions into a chat (those comments are projected onto the wall at the back of the library for audiences to see).

So what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real? As with the Covid pandemic, the pro-vaccine parents are apoplectic at people in the school community putting their kids at risk, especially in the middle of a disease outbreak, while the anti-vaxxers defend their views, repeat misinformation, and resist a vaccine mandate.

“We can try and live up to what we say are our core values or higher selves. But at the end of the day, we’re survivalists,” says Bordelon, who directed “John Proctor Is the Villain” for the Huntington in 2024. “Parents want to protect their children. So when push comes to shove, all these things they say that they believe in are not going to be prioritized over their greatest attachment, which is their kids.”

Which brings up the old paradox of tolerance. In an effort to be tolerant of other’s points-of-view, you can risk elevating and empowering the intolerant and validating those who are just plain wrong. What, in fact, are the limits of tolerance?

“I do think the play a skewering of liberal culture and how we can take our tolerance too far, when we actually just need to, for lack of a better term, pull the trigger and make hard decisions,” Bordelon says. “It takes them a long time in this play to get the school reopened because they give so much time and space to engaging in a debate around vaccines. Instead of saying, we’re actually going to listen to the science and the facts, and this is the choice we’re going to make.”

Yet this era of discord and disagreement, the very nature of the baseline truths are in question, which can make it difficult to engage in debate. “Suddenly, a fact has become malleable,” Bordelon says. “No, facts aren’t malleable. There are not alternative facts.”

That conversation about “feelings versus facts,” Balaban says, “creates a situation where there’s real unstoppable force versus the immovable object in this play when it comes to someone’s feelings and experiences versus the facts on the ground.”

Still, the anti-vax parents are not caricatured. Spector makes you understand their motivations, that it often derives from fear or traumatic episodes from their pasts. “He does such a beautiful job of showing Suzanne’s point of view and her reason for being an anti-vaxxer,” Bordelon says. “He really gives her such a full humanity. She isn’t two dimensional.”

Adds Balaban, “We learn that all of the characters have an experience that informs why they are where they are on the central issue. It’s like, ‘I believe this because this is my lived experience.’ And I think it’s hard to dissuade people from their opinions that are formed by these lived experiences.”

While Spector is skewering tendencies among liberals to behave and speak a certain jargon-filled, performative way, he’s also asking audiences to connect with the characters on a personal level. “There’s some really fun moments where the audience gets to enjoy or see themselves in the characters that we’re playing,” Balaban says. “There are plays about issues that allow the audience to sit back and congratulate themselves. And what I really like about this play is that it really challenges the audience to find themselves or find people that they know in it.”

The live-streamed emergency meeting exposes the divisions and the wide gulf of disagreement. As the scrolling comments become increasingly vitriolic and incendiary, you’re seeing everyone’s worst, most venomous inner-thoughts projected onto the wall. “Just answer honestly: would you rather have measles or autism?” says one parent in the chat. To which another retorts, “Just answer honestly: were you dropped on your head as a child?”

“What I love about that part of the play is that it actually unmasks all of the true nasty feelings that are going on,” Bordelon says. “We’ve watched these five core characters try to cover those feelings with politeness, appropriateness, and PC language. But [with] the parents’ online avatars, everyone’s true feelings and their nastiest selves get exposed.”

She adds that we chuckle at the recognition, because we’ve all seen conversations on social media devolve into acrimony and vitriol. “It’s messed up because it’s still a human interaction,” Bordelon says. “But, I mean, the language in the [livestream] comments are deliciously funny and brilliantly written.”

On Broadway, the audience’s howling laughter in that explosive scene threatened to overwhelm the dialogue. So Spector and Broadway director Anna D. Shapiro had to adjust the performers’ lines and the timing of when certain comments pop up, to leave space for the uproar to die down and allow the dialogue to be heard.

“When I saw it on Broadway, at the second preview, I could tell that they were still trying to find a balance between what the audience needed to hear vocally and the timing of where the laughs come depending on what’s up on the screen,” Bordelon says. “So we’ve been rehearsing with a video monitor behind the actors, so I can watch the livestream comments come up in real time. But it’s all fun and games until the audience gets there!”

At the heart of the play, Bordelon says, is Carina’s argument to Suzanne in the penultimate scene. “We live in a society that’s so driven by individualism. We think individual choice should be our right, rather than thinking about, When do we need to release some individual choices for the good of the whole?” Bordelon says. “Do you want to live in a world where you’re not allowing your child to face the tiniest amount of risk in order to save someone’s aging parent or newborn child? Is that really the kind of society you want to live in? We all have to assume a small amount of risk to take care of the greater good.”

Broadway has long pandered to the gays, but this spring, the Great White Way has been transformed into the Gay White Way, thanks to a trio of musicals flaunting LGBTQ themes, characters and sensibilities. Just in time for Pride, these shows are burning up Broadway and have earned a slew of Tony Award nominations.

First up, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s old warhorse that prowled across Broadway in the 1980s and ’90s has been transformed into “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” reimagined and reset within queer ballroom-culture. Suddenly, the nonsensical story makes infinitely more sense in this heightened world and similarly tight-knit community. Then there’s “Titanique,” a flamboyantly madcap musical that spoofs both pop singer Celine Dion and the blockbuster movie “Titanic,” and flaunts an appearance by a gay iceberg, a “RuPaul’s Drag Race” sequence, and a series of profane and silly in-jokes aimed at gay audiences. Finally, there’s only the second-ever Broadway revival of that cult classic “The Rocky Horror Show,” that iconoclastic outsider musical about a pansexual transvestite from the planet of Transsexual, with its abundance of eccentric characters, unabashed hedonism, and copious audience participation.

All three musicals break the fourth wall with electrifying moments of audience interaction, as actors parade and dance down the aisles and even engage in some improvisation. And like “Oh, Mary,” Cole Escola’s indestructible hit comedy from last season, each show is a rousingly unhinged camp extravaganza that celebrates the resiliency, subversiveness and transgressive spirit of the queer community. With Pride Month arriving, this trio of LGBTQ-themed shows are getting in formation and ready to rock the Tony Awards on June 7.

Cats: The Jellicle Ball

When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” first pounced onto the New York stage in the early 1980s, it was a show that helped transform Broadway into an increasingly spectacle-driven enterprise, ushering in the era of the mega-musical. Detractors mocked its banal, empty-headed lack of ideas and nonsensical plot. Still, curious tourists and suburban audiences flocked to see the kitschy trifle, and they kept returning again and again, charmed by its parade of eccentric feline characters, the extravagant fantasy world created by director Trevor Nunn, and Lloyd Webber’s melodic, swirling, and synth-heavy pastiche score. “Cats” proved to have nine lives, running for nearly 20 years on Broadway, and becoming, for a time, its longest running show. Then came the star-studded 2019 film adaptation, and critics’ claws came out to rake it over the coals once more for its overproduced garishness, bizarrely conceived cat-human hybrids, and other CGI nightmares that left horrified viewers screaming that their eyes had been assaulted.

But on its road to theatrical and cinematic infamy, “Cats” has found yet another life, thanks to co-directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch’s inspired adaptation, dubbed “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” at the Broadhurst Theatre. The baffling show, once kitschy catnip from the era of the British mega-musical, has been reimagined and reset into world of queer ballroom culture that developed in the 1970s and ’80s and united long-marginalized communities of gay and trans people of color. It was brought into the mainstream in Madonna’s video for her iconic “Vogue,” the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” and, later, the Emmy-winning television series “Pose.” These felines in “Jellicle Ball” now have an even more resonant reason to strut down a catwalk, having been transformed into the prancing, swaggering and hip-swaying human dancers of the ballroom competition scene, with all of their vogue-ing, duck-walking, spins-and-dips, and death-drops. With few wording or lyric changes, this new queer context works like wonders. “Jellicle cats come out tonight” has never been more apt, not to mention the show’s emphasis on an almost clandestine, tight-knit community of characters.

Choreographed by Ousmane Omani Wiles and Arturo Lyons, with costumes by Qween Jean, “Pellicle Ball” reframes the show set in the ballroom scene, a safe space and a refuge for the queer community to gather and celebrate, so the story now has a decidedly human dimension. Still, like the original felines from the show, these characters are resilient, perhaps with nine lives of their own, and foster a tight-knit community. Among the pack, there’s the sexy, shirtless Rum Tum Tugger (Sydney James Harcourt, showing off a bejeweled jockstrap); the balletic, impossibly limber trickster Magical Mister Mistoffelees (Robert “Silk” Mason); the hilarious troublemaking Jersey-ites, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser (Jonathan Burke and Dava Huesca); and the Latina railway cat Skimbleshanks (Emma Sofia), an MTA conductor with long nails, hip-length hair and penchant for spinning and dipping, along with master of ceremonies, Munkustrap (Dudney Joseph Jr.), who announces the various competition “cat-egories.”

The show meditates on the concept of legacy and respect for elders who blazed the trail and fought the formative battles against injustice. Grizabella, the faded Glamour Cat, is an aging ballroom dancer and former house mother (played by ballroom Hall-of-Famer “Tempress” Chasity Moore) who feels discarded, forgotten and pitied by the young upstarts—until one of them helps put her back into the spotlight. Her signature operatic ballad “Memory” becomes a poignant anthem to pioneering trans and queer elders. Indeed, the show hits its most exuberant highs with the arrivals of Grizabella; the wizened Gus the Theater Cat, played by veteran MC and ballroom legend Junior LaBeija (seen in “Paris Is Burning”), with his extravagant, flowing robes and talon-like nails; and the regal Old Deuteronomy, played by theater icon André De Shields, with his thick lion-like mane, who speaks volumes with a simple flick of the wrist or a wave of his bejeweled fingers. The meta-theatrical moments with these trailblazing legends give the show an additional layer of meaning.

“Jellicle Ball” doesn’t have quite the same untamed, ecstatic energy and sheer dazzle as it did down when it premiered at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in the summer of 2024. Part of that is no doubt due to the shortened runway (and fewer cafe tables) due to sightline-view limitations in the upper-levels of the Broadhurst. That and the larger venue makes the show slightly less immersive and enveloping, despite some new onstage seating. Still, they’ve amplified some bells and whistles and added a few surprises. But mostly, this conceptual reinvention is an inspired improvement on the original, with the themes of community, caretaking and resiliency resonating in this new queer context in eye-opening and surprising ways. After nabbing nine Tony Award nominations, including best musical revival, it looks like “Cats” may, indeed, be now and forever.

Titaníque

“Titanique” takes the kitsch and camp of “Cats” and dials the irreverence and absurdity to a whole other level. Spoofing the blockbuster disaster movie “Titanic” and French-Canadian pop icon Celine Dion, “Titaníque” also flamboyantly sends-up all things Broadway, while simultaneously celebrating queer culture, with an exuberant party atmosphere thrown in for good measure. It may not be everyone’s taste, but for those with a certain outré sensibility, this show is to die for.

“Titaníque” first became a cult sensation in a subterranean theater downtown, before moving on to a long commercial off Broadway run at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square, running for three years and winning a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical. Now having set sail uptown to the St. James Theatre, with four Tony nominations in hand including best musical, “Titaníque” has been seamlessly scaled-up for the glitz, glamour and garishness of Broadway, while still maintaining its subversive and hilariously outlandish charms. The musical-comedy reimagines the story of “Titanic” from the point-of-view of a sweetly self-aggrandizing Celine Dion, whose indestructible, Oscar and Grammy-winning ballad “My Heart Will Go On” is forever associated with the film. This oddball, eccentric version of Celine, who craves the spotlight, inserts herself into the story’s narrative, to dementedly hilarious effect. It’s so stupid, it’s brilliant.

The show was created by Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, and Tye Blue, three struggling theater artists. The fizzy concept came to them over drinks one night, and they continued to develop it over the next decade in concerts and new stagings. Full of frenzied energy and outlandish, campy humor, “Titaníque” (like “Cats”) bulldozes the fourth wall boundary between audience and performer, especially with a spotlight-craving pop star like Dion emceeing the evening, and features lots of audience interaction.

The show starts at a “Titanic” museum, with the actors as camera-toting visitors being led on a guided tour. Soon, Dion, played by the award-winning Mindelle, has infiltrated the tour, hijacks the proceedings and asks the tourists if they want to hear “the real story.” What unfolds next is a crackpot version of James Cameron’s cinematic epic, as told by a demented Dion, who inserts herself onto the ship of dreams and into a story that she insists is true. At the center of the narrative is the star-crossed lovers from different classes—Rose (Melissa Barrera) and Jack (Constantine Rousouli, bursting out of his too-tight pants). Rose’s vicious mother Ruth—played zestfully by out gay actor Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”’s iconic Sheldon) wearing an extravagant hat with a giant bird on it—is trying to marry Rose off to the wealthy Cal (John Riddle), a fey, pompous ass, because their family is broke.

There’s also the famed survivor “Unsinkable” Molly Brown (singer Deborah Cox, who was once a backup singer for Dion), who gets to sing soaring versions of “All By Myself,” and the character of “Victor Garber” (an electrifying Frankie Grande), the beloved stage and screen actor who played the ship’s architect in the 1997 movie. Here, Victor Garber is the ship’s flamboyant captain, spinning a glow-in-the-dark wheel, alongside a hot-and-horny seaman (Layton Williams). Grande also gets to parody the psychotically-smiling Luigi from Mario Brothers as Jack’s steerage buddy, while Williams doubles as the scene-stealing “Iceberg” who will eventually collide with the ship. With a costume taking a cue from Bowen Yang’s memorable “SNL” Iceberg, Williams channels a combustible Tina Turner and takes the part to a whole other level with a roof-raising rendition of “River Deep, Mountain High.” He won an Olivier Award in London for his powerhouse performance, and often elicits mid-show standing ovations.

With an accent that blends impersonation with delirious comic invention, Mindelle plays the “kooky, crazy” Dion as a bonkers mix of spotlight-craving narcissism, eager-to-please ingratiation, total lack of self-awareness, and a desperate need to be adored. Parsons, with two white doves atop his head, is a riot as a belligerent Mommie-Dearest gold-digger, delivering shockingly venomous outbursts and hilariously outrageous declarations of love and mostly hate. Cox, Williams and Grande are all standouts as well, and Barrera and Rousouli are ace deadpan performers.

As a jukebox musical, “Titaníque” boasts a parade of hit songs from the queen of power ballads, including “I’m Alive,” “You and I,” “Tell Him,” “If You Asked Me To,” “Because You Loved Me,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “All By Myself,” and “Where Does My Heart Beat Now.”

Ribald hijinks, raunchy one-liners and bawdy sexual innuendo abounds, including a side-splitting sequence when Celine and Molly Brown give Rose sex advice in the song “Tell Him,” involving the unsubtle appearance of a large eggplant prop, delivered with deadpan perfection. There are other wickedly funny uses of props, including a large door and a foggy window. There are a rapid-fire array of pop culture references, meta in-jokes, and Easter eggs galore, which are constantly refreshed for the zeitgeist—everything from “Scream” and “Big Bang Theory” spoofs to a famous news blooper to cardboard cutouts of Broadway legend Patti LuPone and recent Tony winner Nicole Scherzinger.

The steel-beamed scenic design has been amped up and expanded from its off-Broadway digs, with the blue Heart of the Ocean jewel hovering from the rafters like a threat from Celine herself—and a Flavor Flav-sized one later dangling across Rose’s chest and practically toppling her over after Cal places around her neck.

While it’s structured as a well-oiled machine, there’s a tossed-off, easygoing quality to the show, and several scenes of improvisation offer audiences the spark of surprise, with Mindelle doing an extended bit about a different Broadway show that changes every night. Albeit, the sense of intimacy and moments of audience interaction can get lost in a much larger venue. At times, the endless jokes and gags can feel a bit exhausting, and your mileage may vary. But even if you don’t connect with one sequence, there’s another deliriously absurd gag, delicious comic moment or bonkers performance just around the corner waiting to grab hold of you. May your heart go on.

The Rocky Horror Show

The Time-Warp is back, and it’s as groovy and outlandish as ever. The starry revival of Richard O’Brien’s now-iconic “The Rocky Horror Show,” which hasn’t been seen on Broadway in nearly a quarter century, proves why this bizarro, transgressive 1970s cult phenom, the ultimate insider-musical for outsiders the world over, still has the ability to shock and awe, make you guffaw, and put a smile on your face. Now playing an extended run at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54, that former palace of glitz, glam and debauchery, “Rocky Horror” has never been for the modest, reserved, or faint of heart—unless you’re like the show’s nerdy lovebirds, Brad and Janet, and ready to let your freak flag fly.

Back in 1975, the stage show was adapted for the big screen as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” with Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon. Channeling the schlock of exploitation B-movies and aimed all the misfits and weirdos of the world, it became a cult sensation and the ultimate midnight-movie favorite, with over-the-top audience participation key to the madness, from flying pieces of toast and toilet paper rolls to shouts of “asshole!”, “slut!” and other profane call-outs.

The film was a trailblazer for queer culture at a time when a long-marginalized LGBTQ community had revolted against their oppressors and was fighting for their carnal freedom. So many gay fans grew up watching the film as their first taste of sexual liberation and a transgressive underground culture. With the last Broadway revival coming in 2000, “Rocky Horror” fanatics have been quivering in antici—say it with me now!—pation for this pop culture phenomenon to return. As with “Cats” and “Titanique,” campiness abounds, but it’s enlivened with the sexy swagger of glam rock and the hard edges of punk. This new revival, directed by “Oh, Mary” co-mastermind Sam Pinkleton, nails the show’s madness and mayhem, its sheer exuberance and its subversive iconoclasm, and it’s earned nine Tony nominations, including best musical revival.

Scenic company dots has given the set a seedy feel, with neon lighting and tinfoil and black plastic everywhere, that taps into the original’s ramshackle, DIY aesthetic, but amped up for Broadway.

The show begins with the Usherette of a faded old cinema, played by ’90s cool-girl icon Juliette Lewis, introducing the night’s “film” with an entrancing rendition of “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” a nod to the sci-fi B-movies that inspired the show. Then the story unfolds. Newly engaged virgins Brad (Andrew Durand) and Janet (Stephanie Hsu) are driving at night in a torrential rainstorm when their car gets a flat tire, forcing them to seek help at a spooky castle up the road—the Frankenstein place.

At the mansion, Brad and Janet meet a few of its strange denizens—a hunchback butler Riff Raff (Amber Gray), with rotted teeth and long braided white hair, maid Magenta (Lewis), and groupie Columbia (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez). Then the master of the house, Frank-N-Furter (Luke Evans), descends the staircase clad in leather, fishnets and a corset and announces that he’s “a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,” a glam rock god in a codpiece and thigh-high stiletto boots. The couple just want to use the phone to call for help—they’re driving to visit their former science tutor Dr. Scott—but they find themselves drawn into the strange happenings at this pleasure palace. Before they know it, they’re stripped down to their underwear and pulled. Into the world of this pansexual mad scientist. A night of lustful lunacy unfolds, as Frank-N-Furter seduces both Janet and Brad and drives them to ecstasy. Later, Janet catches a naughty Brad and Frank, via video monitor, in flagrante delicto, and she wonders what’s come over them.

In a subterranean laboratory, Frank reveals he’s also a stark-raving mad scientist who’s made his very own Frankenstein-like creation—a hunky companion named Rocky (Josh Rivera), a muscle man with thick thighs, blonde hair and a sheer wrestling singlet and jockstrap. An old flame of Frank’s appears (Harvey Guillén), and Frank dispatches of him. Dr. Scott (Guillén), who’s investigating UFOs for the government, materializes in the mansion, and Brad and Janet learn that Frank and Co. are aliens from outer space. Frank puts them under a spell, and they lose all carnal inhibitions and engage in orgiastic sex to “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” But Riff Raff and Magenta have had enough and want to go back to their home planet, arriving with ray-guns to put a stop to Frank’s kinky escapades.

Swaddled in a smoking jacket, “Saturday Night Live” vet Rachel Dratch plays the show’s droll Narrator with a knowing wink, an arched eyebrow, and some quick-witted improvisations to many of the audience interjections. Evans oozes seductive magnetism as ringleader Frank. Gray is a bizarre menace as Riff Raff. Lewis is the right mix of zany and affecting as Magenta. Rodriguez has a deeply affecting moment in act two that makes the hair on your neck stand up, and so does Evans with the poignant rendition of “I’m Going Home.” Meanwhile, Durand and Hsu are a delirious delight as two squares who learn to let go and take a walk on the wild side.

Audience interaction has been part of the “Rocky Horror” fandom ever since it became a cult film classic in the late ’70s. An enduring example: When the virginal Janet, says of Rocky’s bulging-biceps, “Well, I don’t like men with too many muscles,” the audiences shouts, “Just one big one!” But producers have asked audiences to dial back their call-outs, which can overwhelm and disrupt the show, as it reportedly did during previews when the performers got flustered, and it was difficult for some patrons to hear dialogue between all the shouting. It’s one thing for hardcore fans to be screaming “asshole,” “slut” and other raunchy one-liners at midnight film screenings. But this is, after all, a live show with live performers. The downside: That request from producers and reticence from the audience sapped some of the energy from the theater the night that I saw it, though there was still plenty of callouts and interaction, especially with Dratch, who volleyed back the comments with zingers of her own.

At one point, Frank descends from the rafters riding a giant crescent moon, a homage to the famed original fixture (minus the coke spoon!) that hung at Studio 54 in its heyday. The show still has a relentlessly manic, sordidly ribald energy, but as with “Titanique,” the charms and gags can wear thin after a while. It’s a fun and exuberant night at the theater, but in the light of day, what does it all amount to? A shellshocked Brad and Janet are left wondering the same at the end of their experience. Have they been changed for good, and how will they reinvent themselves? Indeed, that question is still sharply relevant today. In a reactionary, authoritarian moment for the country, where gay and trans rights are under assault and immigrants and other minorities are further marginalized, a message of subversive non-conformity, sexual liberation, expansive gender expression, and embracing your true self, freak flag and all, still resonates deeply. Now, let’s all do the Time-Warp Again.

With strong vocals and stage presence, ensemble member Indijhan Richard begins this first number from a tower upstage in a neighborhood of Tudor-style homes, setting the scene as other cast members join in. The high-energy production, packed full of phenomenal singing and acting, is centered on two brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom, who are trying to oust William Shakespeare from his literary throne by creating the world’s first musical. But outwitting and outwriting a fabulously smug Shakespeare (an excellent Jared Troilo) is more challenging than they’d hoped.

In the show, the rage-filled Nick Bottom (a super Ryan Mardesich) is desperately trying to pen something popular after his last few plays have failed. He also has to take care of his strong-willed wife, Bea (an outstanding Kristian Espiritu), who in her own way pushes against gender roles while trying to help her family. To get help, he hires a zany soothsayer, Thomas Nostradamus (a comical and exemplary Joy Clark), who advises Nick that the next big thing is a musical. Nostradamus also shares that Shakespeare’s biggest hit will be called “Omelet.” So, Nick sets out to write it first and won’t tolerate naysayers. Read the rest of the review here.

This year, there are “new plays and a new musical by regional writers, full productions, staged readings, and a collaboration with Boston Theater Company’s “Queer Voices” initiative,” according to a statement.

There are about a half-dozen plays about various topics, from Christmas to crime and Greek gods in an urban neighborhood. For example, in “When Santa Fell to Earth: A Musical,” a dictatorial Santa takes control of the skies and nearly destroys Christmas. In “Crime Fiction,” a high-profile mystery writer is stalked, and a reporter connected to the victim must find the culprit before it’s too late. And in “GOOD: A Play About Gods in the Ghetto,” the powerful Zeus is removed from his community, causing chaos in this tale where Greek mythology and contemporary society are combined.

Official descriptions of the shows are below:

In “When Santa Fell to Earth: A Musical” (May 7 at 7:30 p.m.; May 9 at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.; May 10 at 4 p.m.), a once-joyful holiday tradition is upended. Long ago, a band of roaming Santas spread wonder across the world each winter, but that magic has been nearly extinguished since the rise of the tyrannical Santa Gerold Goblynch, who has seized control of the skies and transformed the season into a profit-driven enterprise devoid of meaning. The only force standing in his way is Niklas Goodfellow, a renegade Santa in hiding.

When Niklas and his scrappy crew crash-land in the bleak “Goblynched” town of Misty Close, they encounter a community—especially its children—that has lost its sense of joy and belief. As they start to rekindle seasonal spirit through small acts of magic and connection, Niklas and his companions face an impossible choice: remain on the run, or risk everything to confront Goblynch and restore the wonder, generosity, and hope of the winter holidays.

Laura Crook Waxdal is the playwright and co-lyricist with Mark Hartman, who is also co-composer with John Kielty. The director is Allison Choat.

The line between truth and invention blurs in the new play “Crime Fiction” (May 8 at 7:30 p.m.; May 9 at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.; May 10 at 4 p.m.) as reporter Maddie becomes entangled in a mystery far closer to home than any she has covered before. When a member of her mystery writing group—its most successful and high-profile voice—becomes the target of a stalker, the group bands together to uncover who is behind the threat.

As clues mount and tensions rise, Maddie navigates a maze of half-truths, misdirection and manipulation, where every theory seems plausible, but nothing is quite what it appears. Following a trail laced with twists that pulls the audience into the mystery, Maddie pursues the truth as the stakes escalate and the danger turns deadly.

STAGED READINGS

In “GOOD: A Play About Gods in the Ghetto,” written by local actor Catia and directed by Afrikah Selah, myth and modern life collide when Zeus—a powerful, volatile figure in his community—is suddenly removed, leaving both relief and upheaval in his wake. As those around him grapple with the fallout, Jenmari struggles to survive the dysfunction he left behind, Cassie imagines life beyond the neighborhood, and Phro hides a once-dangerous relationship. As old hierarchies crumble, the play explores what happens when those once seen as gods are revealed to be human, asking whether true freedom is possible after tyranny—and whether forgiveness can exist without justice. (May 7 at 7:30 p.m; May 9 at 4 p.m.)

“Port of Entry” by playwright Talya Kingston (and directed by M. Bevin O’Gara) takes place in the back office of a small New England airport, where TSA agent Hank is training recruit Chloe on the very day that a new law, commonly called “The Muslim Ban,” is suddenly enacted. When Jana arrives on a flight from the Middle East, all three are entangled in the chaotic fallout from the new government mandate. In a rapidly shifting political landscape, this new play questions who is protecting our country…and who are they protecting it from? (May 8 at 7:30 p.m.; May 10 at 12 p.m.)

“Tell Her What She’s Won, Johnny” written by Ken Green and directed by Audrey Seraphin, is set in 1955 when Ruth Traveler becomes the first Black contestant to appear on the nation’s top game show, “Do It For The Money”...a moment the producers frame as history in the making. But Ruth has simpler, more immediate goals: she’s there to win a much-needed refrigerator, not to be a symbol. As pressures of representation mount in the glare of a national spotlight, the play reveals the constant identity negotiation required to be Black in predominantly white spaces, and explores the cost of visibility when all Ruth wants is to simply be. (May 7 at 7:30 p.m.; May 10 at 12 p.m.

“White Phoenix” by Yide Cai is an epic family drama that unfolds across decades and continents, brought to life by two actors in a single setting. The play follows Li CunYi, a Chinese orphan who vows to reunite with his sister after she is adopted by an American family. As CunYi navigates adulthood in China—entangled with the influential Zhao YanYan—his sister comes of age in a Washington, D.C. political family and enters a forbidden relationship. The siblings’ parallel journeys converge during a diplomatic mission, leading to a long-awaited reunion that reflects the complex, interdependent relationship between China and the United States. (May 9 at 7 p.m.; May 10 at 2p.m.).

Over its storied 34-year history, Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company has developed a well-deserved reputation for producing under-appreciated musicals that failed commercially or critically, and in the process helping to rehabilitate and burnish their reputations. From “Parade” and “A Man of No Importance” to “The Scottsboro Boys” and “Violet,” the shows mounted by the company and its founding artistic director Paul Daigneault offered innovative framings or found new contemporary resonances that allowed audiences to see these stories in a different light.

Their latest gambit is “Swept Away,” programmed by new artistic director Dawn Simmons, now running at the Wimberly Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion through May 23. The show, which had a brief run on Broadway in late 2024, tells the story of a group of sailors on whaling boat off the coast of New England that gets caught in a storm and shipwrecked, leaving a small group adrift at sea in a lifeboat for weeks without food or water. Loosely based on a real 19th century shipwreck, it features the music of the American folk and bluegrass trio the Avett Brothers. Due in part to the band’s ardent fan base, the show developed something of a cult following despite its abbreviated run, and SpeakEasy’s is the first American production of “Swept Away” following the Broadway premiere.

The musical took its initial inspiration from the Avett Brothers’ 2004 album, “Mignonette,” which was itself inspired by the true story of a British yacht that capsized after being struck by a giant wave in 1884, and the harrowing tale of survival and cannibalism that led to a precedent-setting murder trial. In adapting the story for the stage, book writer John Logan (“Moulin Rouge! The Musical” “Red,” “Skyfall”) transported the narrative to the shores of America, specifically New Bedford and the dying whaling industry of the late 19th century.

In addition to moving the location to New England, Logan mined the full Avett Brothers catalogue to write the show. So there are songs like “Murder in the City” from their 2008 EP “The Second Gleam,” and “May It Last,” “Ain’t No Man,” Satan Pulls the Strings” and “No Hard Feelings” from their 2016 record “True Sadness.” While some theatergoers may raise a wary eyebrow at the jukebox musical genre, “Swept Away” is no bio-show spin through a pop star’s song catalogue. Indeed, Jeremy Johnson, who’s directing the show for SpeakEasy Stage, says that the music is so affecting that he doesn’t think of it as a jukebox show.

“You have this music that’s so humanizing and vulnerable, and it’s integrated into the story and how we make the connection with the characters,” he says. “And the music comes out of the Americana tradition, which is really rich in storytelling, with songs that come from a character’s voice or a point of view. They’ve got arcs to them that you don’t always get in a jukebox musical. So they’re already set up in a great way to be theater songs, even though that wasn’t their original intention.”

“You sort of forget that it’s a jukebox musical,” says Bishop Levesque, who plays the character of Big Brother. “Sometimes people say ‘jukebox musical’ out of the side of their mouth, but this doesn’t feel like that. The music and the scenes in between and the story itself are all woven together pretty seamlessly.”

At the center of “Swept Away” is the troubled figure called Mate (Peter DiMaggio), who seems to be recalling the tale of survival as a dying man flashing back on the harrowing ordeal. As the ship gets ready to leave port in New Bedford, an enthusiastic, wide-eyed character, dubbed Little Brother (Max Connor), saunters onto the deck, hoping to join the crew on their impending journey. Yearning for adventure on the high seas, he sweet-talks his way onto the ship, trailed not long after by his Big Brother (Bishop Levesque), who’s tracked him down. He orders him to return to their family farm and refuses to leave until Little Brother comes with him. Soon, the ship departs from the port with both brothers onboard. As the journey continues, Big Brother’s religiosity leads to clashes with Mate and the rest of the crew, and Mate and Big Brother engage in a kind of war for Little Brother’s soul.

“Mate is this exciting, engaging character who kind of starts to pull Little Brother away from Big Brother,” Johnson says. “So now there’s this tug of war between Big Brother and Mate for the heart and soul of little brother, and some jealousy and competition between these characters. Who’s going to influence this kid and what kind of choices is he going to make based on who he’s looking up to?”

Johnson says he related to the complicated sibling dynamic because he, too, has a younger brother. “This is someone you love, who knows you in a way that no one else does,” he says. “But there’s these really interesting family tensions that we don’t always talk about. There are responsibilities that I think older siblings sometimes have to deal with, and then younger siblings often want to live their own life out of the shadow of their older sibling.”

For Levesque, the brothers love each other, but “annoy the hell out of each other in ways that only brothers can.”

“They’re both looking to find their place in the world. And unfortunately, they both see that in very different ways,” he says. “Big brother feels the obligation to their family. He needs to stay at home, run the farm, and carry on a legacy. While younger brother is more interested in forging a new path and figuring out a life that doesn’t look like everyone who came before him.”

Then there’s the weary Captain (Christopher Chew), who’s spent most of his existence at sea and doesn’t know any other way of life. But as the American whaling industry has become increasingly obsolete with the rise of petroleum, the Captain knows that his seafaring life is coming to a close. He reveals to Mate that the company that owns the vessel is selling it off, and this will be the ship’s final voyage.

“You have a captain who has been doing this all his life, who suddenly finds himself being irrelevant and obsolete,” Johnson says. “The captain’s song, ‘May at Last,’ is really about facing that feeling. ‘I was this powerful and relevant person for so long, and in the blink of an eye, I have now become this forgotten person with no purpose.’”

Not long into their journey, the ship get caught in a massive storm and the vessel capsizes, leaving Mate, Little Brother, Big Brother and the Captain adrift at sea for weeks in a lifeboat, with no food or water and dwindling hopes of rescue. As their desperation increases and hallucinations set in, the shipwrecked men must make unspeakably difficult decisions to survive, reckoning with their pasts in the process.

“The show asks some big questions. What would you do to survive? Where do you go when you die? If I don’t get to see the love of my life again, what would I want them to know? What would I say to them? What messages do I want to leave behind about who I was and what kind of person I tried to be?”

To create the moment of the ship encountering a storm and sinking, the SpeakEasy production relies on inventive stagecraft, since they don’t have all the bells and whistles of the Broadway production and its dramatic mechanics of the ship deck seizing upwards. The SpeakEasy production uses an aerialist. They’re one of the sailors climbing the masts and swinging from ropes and play a prominent role in the shipwreck moment.

“I’m a big fan of aerialists and circus stuff. It immediately puts you into the world of metaphor,” Johnson says. “I kept getting this image of this drowning sailor and I’m like, well, ‘How do you depict a drowning?’ Well, you get someone suspended, and how do you get someone suspended? You put them in the air. And so the opening image of the play started to be this drowning figure in this nightmare that Mate wakes up from.”

Acrobatics and aerial artistry also offers the thrill of watching artists do something risky, Johnson says, which echoes the dangers inherent in whaling and seafaring. “This is a group of sailors looking for excitement and adventure, and we get to watch [an aerialist] do something exciting and thrilling,” Johnson says. “And we’ve figured out a way to really weave this into the fabric of how we’re telling the story, so it doesn’t feel like a one-time trick.”

To prepare for the production, Johnson went to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where they have one of the largest whaling ship models in the world. “You can actually climb on it and move around it and get a sense of what it felt like,” he says. “We’re so lucky that we have so many resources right in our backyard.”

Across the street, he visited Seaman’s Bethel, a chapel that sailors would often visit before departing on their dangerous voyages, immortalized in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” Later, he traveled to Mystic, Connecticut, where the Charles W. Morgan is moored. A National Historic Landmark, it’s the only remaining wooden whaling ship from the 19th century, the oldest surviving merchant vessel, and the second-oldest seaworthy vessel in the world after the U.S.S. Constitution.

“What stood out to me the most is that the ship is sort of a microcosm of the country,” he says. “You’ve got the captain with a really nice cabin, and his first mate with a decent-size cabin. Then all of the sailors, who were mostly people of color, immigrants and indigenous people, were crammed into the front of the ship into these small bunk beds. Almost all of the profits went to the millionaires back on land who owned the ship and never had to risk anything. So you see the whole stratification of society on the ship. The hierarchy is vivid.”

The score mines the Avett Brothers’ sweeping, harmonic sounds, from folk, bluegrass and Americana to rock, punk, blues and gospel. The songs are “surprisingly theatrical,” Johnson says. “They feel like they’re coming from a character in a way that you don’t really get from pop music. They’re already functioning on a much deeper level, which is what you want for theater music. You want there to be complexity to the thoughts. You want there to be an emotional arc for the character in the song.”

For the first half of “Swept Away,” the music is lively, rowdy and riotous, with a lot of foot stomping, hand clapping and masculine posturing. After the shipwreck, with the four survivors clinging to existence on a lifeboat the music becomes more brooding and “internal,” Johnson says, and the show grapples with questions about family, survival and redemption. “Have I lived the way that I wanted to? Can I live with the choices that I made or do I have regrets? And if I do, what do I do with those regrets, and how do I make my peace with my life? What does redemption look like? What is my legacy, and what do I leave behind?”

“Swept Away,” music and lyrics by the Avett Brothers, book by John Logan, directed by Jeremy Johnson. At: The Wimberly Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, through May 23. www.speakeasystage.com

As celebrated playwright August Wilson was nearing the end of his monumental 10-play American Century Cycle, chronicling the Black experience in each decade of the 20th century, he was finally ready to face the beginning and write the play that launches the cycle. Set in 1904, “Gem of the Ocean” arrived as the ninth play in the epoch but it’s first play chronologically, and it encapsulates many of the Cycle’s themes and ideas, including Black Americans’ search for identity and a place to call home in a nation that enslaved them and has continued to marginalize their existence. In 2004, “Gem” was produced at Boston’s Huntington theater company, one of Wilson longtime artistic homes, on its journey to Broadway later that year. Now, Boston audiences have a chance to see the play again, produced by Actors’ Shakespeare Project from April 16-May 17 at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury.

In “Gem,” the fourth play that ASP has produced in the Cycle, audiences finally met the towering figure of Aunt Ester. The then-285-year-old serves as the spiritual center of the 10 plays, a woman that Wilson, who died in 2005, deemed “the most significant persona of the cycle.” “The characters, after all, are her children,” he wrote. A so-called “soul cleanser” and conjurer of the past, Ester embodies the history and culture of Black Americans since they were first stolen and brought to the shores of the nation as enslaved people in 1619.

In Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” set in 1969 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where most of his plays unfolded, audiences first heard Aunt Ester spoken of in reverence when two characters discuss their experiences going to her house with the red door to have their “souls washed.” She’s a woman who helps the distressed and the distraught, the anguished souls of the world, “make you right with yourself.” In “King Hedley II,” set in 1985, her death, at the age of 366, was announced with portentous doom by a street prophet named Stool Pigeon. “Close your windows! Turn your lamp low! We in trouble now,” he said ominously.

Ester finally stepped into the limelight in physical form in “Gem,” and her spirit also suffuses “Radio Golf,” the last play in the cycle, set in 1999. That comedic drama, which premiered in 2005, focused on the battle to protect Ester’s longtime home from real estate developers who had slated it for demolition, in order to make way for a new shopping and apartment complex that could help to revitalize the Hill, but erase a key figure in its history. One of those developers is Harmond Wilks, a Black man who hopes to run for mayor and to push his way into the a world of power and wealth controlled by white men.

“It’s almost transformative to finally encounter Aunt Ester in a living form,” in “Gem,” says Monica White Ndounou, who’s directing the play for Actors’ Shakespeare Project. “I’ve had that experience of audience members who are familiar with the other plays, and Aunt Ester resonates for them because they have an anticipation of encountering her. She’s mythological in status. So it’s very exciting in that sense. But then you also have people who are not familiar with the plays, but they’re familiar with the culture, and they recognize her anyway.”

Having served on the board of the August Wilson Society and worked on many of the plays in the Cycle, White Ndounou has a deep scholarly and artistic knowledge of Wilson’s work. An associate professor at Dartmouth College, she also helped organize the 2018 International Black Theater Summit, “Breaking New Ground Where We Stand,” which took up the legacy of Wilson’s pioneering National Black Theatre Summit “On Golden Pond” in 1998.

The character of Aunt Ester, she explains, “is grounded in a tradition and legacy of Black women who have been, in many senses, the spiritual caretakers within the community, who are often the people working behind the scenes in the movements, making sure things happen, ensuring that we are taking care of the most vulnerable and looking out for one another.”

Unfolding in 1904 when the scars of slavery and the Civil War are still fresh for some of its characters, “Gem of the Ocean” centers on Citizen Barlow (Joshua Lee Robinson), a young man who fled from Alabama after committing a crime of desperation. He’s looking for redemption and seeks out the sage, equanimous Aunt Ester to absolve his guilt and shame. He feels responsibility to his role in a man’s tragic death. The allegorical figure of Ester is cared for by her housekeeper Black Mary (Marhadoo Effeh), her protege in the art of “soul cleansing,” and Eli (Derek Thomas), a handyman and protector of the house.

Solly Two Kings (Jonathan Kitt) is a former slave who became a conductor on the Underground Railroad and scout for the Union Army. He’s a friend of Ester’s and an oracle-like figure. When his sister in Alabama writes to tell him about the increasing danger of living in the South, he’s determined to rescue her and bring her back North. Rutherford Selig (Michael Broadhurst), a small-time peddler, is a white man and another friend of Ester’s.

Then there’s Black Mary’s brother Caesar Wilks (Kadahj Bennett), a local entrepreneur and constable. He plays by the powerful white man’s oppressive rules and does their bidding in order to get ahead. A controversy at a Pittsburgh steel mill galvanizes the Black community, after a worker gets accused of stealing and refuses to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Having jumped into the river and drown, he becomes a martyr to his coworkers, and they go on strike and riot against the injustice.

The play culminates with Ester, inside her parlor, bringing Citizen on a spiritual quest to the mythical City of Bones aboard the slave ship, Gem of the Ocean, and conjuring the ghosts of history. The journey leads Citizen to a reckoning with his past, a personal epiphany, and revelatory insight into the suffering and triumph of his ancestors. Before this dramatic seance unfolds, the steel mill goes up in flames, and Caesar goes on a scorched earth campaign to locate the culprit, leading to a confrontation with Aunt Ester over Caesar’s distorted morality and disregard for his community.

For Regine Vital, who’s playing Aunt Ester, “Gem of the Ocean” was the first Wilson play she ever encountered. She saw it as a theater student at Boston University when the show was produced at the Huntington in 2004 starring Phylicia Rashad. At the end of the first act, she was sobbing. “By the end of the play, I was like, ‘This is everything one could want theater to be.’ I had a spiritual experience. It was cultural, it was theatrical, it was intellectual, all the things you want to happen when you experience art. And that started me on my Wilson journey.”

“Gem of the Ocean” exemplifies Wilson’s blending of the epic and allegorical with the poetry of everyday vernacular. So as an actor, Vital says, she has to find ways to make her performance embody Aunt Ester’s mythic qualities “and still have it feel authentic and real and true. There’s a line in the show, ‘Aunt Esther ain’t got no magic,’ and yet every little thing she does is magic. So I got to still be a human person living in a human world, but I’m also a conduit to something else and both at all times.”

The play’s contemporary resonance is clear. The events of the past decade in America has shown that the country is still fighting many of the same battles over its history and avoiding any reckoning over the scars of slavery and Jim Crow. Even the gains of the Civil Rights movement, once widely supported, are under threat. The galvanizing work of the groundbreaking 1619 Project—and the subsequent backlash from those angered by its conclusions—encapsulates that refusal to grapple with the past.

“Considering what we’re living through right now, it’s hard not to see the relevance,” White Ndounou says. “There’s certain things happening now in the world, and then you hear certain lines in the play, and it’s so eerily familiar. You would think that over a hundred years later, we would’ve gotten ourselves together as a nation to not have to be revisiting the undermining of laws for birthright citizenship, for voting rights, and more.”

In her Director’s Note, she mentions James Baldwin’s famous line from a 1962 essay, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” and points out how some politicians and political groups are now fighting to alter and erase Black history and sanitize the history of slavery in America—through book bans, changes to museum exhibits, and “the dismantling of monuments that acknowledge these atrocities,” White Ndounou says.

“There’s this refusal for this nation to truly face its history, and we keep repeating it. So these ICE raids you’ve been seeing, this is not new. People keep saying, ‘Well, this is not America. This is not our country.’ But it absolutely is. All of these things have been done to Black communities historically.”

Indeed, many observers have likened the brutal ICE raids that target immigrant communities, and the separation of families, with the slave patrols and slave catchers of the South. “Gem” also highlights the forced labor of Black Americans in the South in the post-Emancipation era and the exploitation of Black labor, and discrimination faced by workers, at factories in the industrialized North.

Theater and storytelling, though, can serve as a source of reflection and a conduit for change, White Ndounou says. She emphasizes that a theme of “Gem of the Ocean” and the Century Cycle itself is the need for healing. “But not the kind of healing that ignores,” she cautions. “You cannot heal a shotgun wound to the chest by wishing it away or pretending it’s not there. It has to be treated. A reckoning has to happen—not the pretense of a reckoning of a performative one, but a true and actual reckoning, in which there are significant changes made that address the harm and how it persists.”

At one point in the play, Aunt Ester says to Citizen, “Lord, you got to find something else to be at the center of your life.” That idea, White Ndounou says, is key to repairing the wounds of the past and figuring out how to move forward.

She points out that the culture is rife with narratives that grapple with the trauma of the Black experience in America. But “as we’re thinking about confronting the past,” she says, “there are ways in which we can approach this individually and collectively that recognizes both sides of the coin, the joy and the trauma of those experiences. And part of that healing is finding something else to be at the center.”

The challenge of reckoning with the past, she says, is wrestling with the guilt and the shame that can arise. “People don’t want to feel guilty for the privilege that they have based on the things that were done in the past, and then other people don’t want to feel ashamed by having had these harms committed to them and their ancestors,” White Ndounou says. “So suppose we have something else at the center of our collective healing. This is what ‘Gem of the Ocean poses.’ What do we need to heal individually and what do we need to heal collectively? That should be the focus of how we move forward.”

“There’s still an opportunity for us to live up to what this nation claimed to be, but we do have to take action,” she adds. “Everybody has a role to play. And we don’t have to wait for permission.

“Gem of the Ocean,” produced by Actors’ Shakespeare Project, at Hibernian Hall, Roxbury, through May 17. www.actorsshakespeareproject.org

The Boston Theater Critics Association recently announced the nominations for the annual Elliot Norton Awards.

1More than 130 nominations in over two dozen categories of outstanding actors, directors, designers, choreographers, musicians, and productions and five awards for visiting productions were announced today by the Boston Theater Critics Association (BTCA) for the 43^rd Annual Elliot Norton Awards. The awards ceremony will be held on Monday, June 1, 2026 at 7 PM, at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Tickets are now on sale. The full list of nominations can be found here.

Several awards have already been announced ahead of time for touring productions and performers, with the winners receiving their awards at the ceremony. The celebrated, Needham-based Arlekin theater won Outstanding Visiting Play for their touring production of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s masterpiece, “Our Class,” presented at the Calderwood Pavilion last spring and directed by Igor Golyak. Outstanding Visiting Musical goes to Shaina Taub’s history musical “Suffs,” about the long fight for women’s suffrage, presented by Broadway in Boston in March. Sam Tutty triumphed for Outstanding Performance in a Visiting Musical for “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York),” presented by the American Repertory Theater last spring and now running on Broadway. Chulpan Khamatova will take home Outstanding Performance in a Visiting Play for “Our Class.” Finally, Suzy Eddie Izzard captured Outstanding Visiting Solo Performance for her one-person “The Tragedy of Hamlet” at the Boch Center.

This year’s recipient of the 2026 Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence is award-winning owner/producer Bill Hanney who re-opened the nationally recognized North Shore Music Theatre and R.I.s landmark 500-seat professional summer theatre Theatre By The Sea, and whose work as a producer has been seen in New England, on Broadway, and in London’s West End.

Special Citations will be awarded to Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in honor of its 30th Anniversary Season, Blue Man Group in honor of its 30-year residency in Boston, and to veteran arts administrators Temple Gill and Jim Torres in honor of their decades of service to the theater community.

The 2026 Elliot Norton Arts Education Award will be presented to Open Door Theater which has been making theater accessible on both sides of the curtain since 1980. They are one of the only integrated, accessible theater troupes in the nation to stage full-scale high-quality productions featuring actors who are Deaf, Blind, Disabled, Autistic and Neurodiverse. All Open Door Theater productions are ASL interpreted, Open Captioned, Sensory Friendly and Audio Described.

Joyce Kulhawik, president of the Boston Theater Critics Association, stated, “As AI looms and our social and political environment grows increasingly surreal— theater artists are keeping it real and telling human stories for warm-blooded audiences, stories that let us stand in each other’s shoes and connect us to ourselves and each other. Let’s celebrate these artists in person, for one fabulous evening!”

The Elliot Norton Awards are presented annually by the Boston Theater Critics Association (Don Aucoin, Jules Becker, Jared Bowen, Christopher Ehlers, Joyce Kulhawik, Charles Munitz, R. Scott Reedy, Shelley Sackett, Jacquinn Sinclair, Bob Verini, and Lynne Weiss) to honor the outstanding work of the season in Greater Boston.

The Elliot Norton Awards are named for the eminent Boston theater critic Elliot Norton, who remained an active supporter of drama, both locally and nationally, until his death in 2003 at the age of 100. Despite shrinking governmental support for the arts, The Boston Theater Critics Association carries on Mr. Norton’s legacy in championing our outstanding theater community!

Special and honored guests at the awards in past years comprise a who’s who of distinguished artists whose work has appeared on Boston’s stages, including: Al Pacino, Chita Rivera, Olympia Dukakis, Faye Dunaway, August Wilson, Melinda Lopez, Randy Rainbow, Cherry Jones, Lea DeLaria, Tommy Tune, Edward Albee, Brian Dennehy, Julie Harris, Sir Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, and Jason Robards Jr.

This year’s recipient of The Elliot Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence is Bill Hanney who is honored and proud to have been responsible for the re-opening of the nationally renowned 1500-seat North Shore Music Theatre in 2010 (nsmt.org). Aside from his work operating North Shore Music Theatre, one of Bill’s crowning achievements was the 2007 purchase and re-opening of Theatre By The Sea, a landmark 500-seat professional summer theatre and restaurant, which will be entering its twentieth successful season of operation in Matunuck, RI in 2026 (theatrebythesea.com). Bill is a co-producer on the new Broadway play, The Shark Is Broken, Alice In Wonderland in London’s West End and recently co-produced a New York City workshop of The SeaView Nursing Home for the Newly Deceased. Bill is an investor in the recent Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Pippin, as well as the First National Tour. Bill is currently expanding his group of live theatres with his new multi venue concept “Bill Hanney’s Entertainment Experience” (coming soon to Hyannis, MA and Portland, ME) which will host a combination of live theater, movies, concerts and show clubs. He began his career in show business at age 19, leasing and developing movie theaters, including his first multiplex in Quincy, Massachusetts. Before long, he was booking rock shows (Jefferson Starship, Rush) and other types of live entertainment, which eventually led to the presenting and producing of Broadway productions. One such show was an appearance by the legendary mime artist, Marcel Marceau. As president of Broadway Productions, Bill presented national tours such as Annie, Amadeus, Dancin’, Peter Pan, Rocky Horror Show and Mark Twain starring Hal Holbrook, throughout New England including Worcester, Springfield, Portland, Maine and Boston. Throughout his career, Bill has stayed focused on his movie theatre chain having bought, built, owned, operated, and sold more than 30 cinemas. His company, Entertainment Cinemas, currently operates nine movie complexes in four states. Bill holds the record for the longest running tenure as Chairman of the Board of the Theatre Owners of New England.

The washerwomen and their courage lingered in Smith’s mind long after that visit. Smith said she started hearing the voices of her ancestors while driving home from work one day after turning in the article. When she got home, she immediately wrote the first 37 pages. It took a few years to finish the script, but “The Wash”–in which the characters are named after women in Smith’s family–was first staged in 2024. And the play, with its vibrant characters and moving choreography, is part of a Reconstruction-era trilogy that includes “The Vote” and “The Knot,” which Smith is still writing. I had a chance to speak with Smith, and one of the actresses from the staged reading, MaConnia Chesser, about the play (which will kick of Front Porch’s 2026-2027 season), its significance and how Chesser works to change the world through her art.

Read more

Subscribe now

Faye Dunaway, the legendary actress and Academy Award winner, looms large over Matthew Lombardo’s new comedy “When Playwrights Kill.”

Part scalpel-sharp showbiz satire, part backstage farce, with a dash of tell-all memoir, “When Playwrights Kill” is inspired by the bonkers true story of Dunaway’s epic Mommie Dearest-meltdown during the 2019 Boston run of Lombardo’s one-person bio-play “Tea at Five,” about an aging Katherine Hepburn, that had its sights set on Broadway. The scene of that crime, as it were, is the same historic venue, the Huntington Theatre, where Lombardo’s new play is now in the midst of two-week run through April 18 (though neither show was a Huntington theater production).

During the run-up to “Tea at Five,” Dunaway exhibited increasingly erratic behavior, not entirely surprising for a notoriously prickly personality, one who famously portrayed an abusive Joan Crawford in the 1981 melodrama “Mommie Dearest.” She was often hours late for rehearsal, failed to memorize her lines, and eventually needed an earpiece to have most of the words and blocking fed to her. Worse, she was accused of bullying and verbally abusing staff members and crew, and creating a “hostile” and “dangerous” workplace. It all culminated with Dunaway reportedly slapping and throwing things at crew members who were trying to put on her wig. Following that incident, Dunaway was summarily fired by the producers.

Headlined by a bevy of Broadway stars, “When Playwrights Kill” is a wildly exaggerated roman-à-clef recounting of Lombardo’s experience writing the play, getting it produced, and working with Dunaway, famed for films like “Chinatown,” “Network” and “Bonnie Clyde.” The story has been outlandishly heightened to hilariously farcical and sensationalized effect. But there are undoubtedly morsels of truth drawn from real life—the allegedly abusive behavior of a notorious diva, her failure to memorize the script, and the need to eventually have lines fed through an earpiece were all reported by Michael Reidel of the New York Post at the time.

At the center of the story is the neurotic struggling playwright, Jack Hawkins, played by Matt Doyle (a Tony winner for the 2021-22 revival of “Company”), whose dreams of creative expression and commercial success feel constantly in tension. Desperate for a breakthrough, he writes a play, “The Return,” about a legendary actress attempting a comeback on Broadway after being blacklisted by Hollywood, and gets a bite from a shady producer, Freddie Carlton (Adam Heller, “Some Like It Hot”). He sees dollar signs in a one-person show with a single set (fewer costs!) if they can cast a big name. Once a deal is signed, they bring in jaded veteran director Oliver Kendall Walker (three-time Tony nominee Kevin Chamberlin, “The Addams Family”), who’s seen it all in show-business and lived to tell the tale.

The trio bandy about potential female luminaries for their star vehicle. Meryl Streep is a pie-in-the-sky impossibility, and the litany of other big names, from Glenn Close and Jessica Lange to Angela Bassett, are busy doing television. That’s when they land on the Dunaway-like Brooke Remington, played by Tony winner Beth Leavel (“The Prom”), a New York stage veteran who knows her way around playing an imperious, addled diva. Brooke was once a major Oscar-winning movie star, but she’s now regarded as poison in the industry—not only cuckoo bananas but a royal pain in the ass to work with. As Oliver explains, “Brooke Remington is perfect for this character because she is this character!” At first, Jack is deeply skeptical—until Freddie tells him how much money he could make from the royalties. This will be her big comeback, Oliver grandly suggests, “Like Gloria Swanson in ‘Sunset Boulevard’!” To which Jack, narrating the story, deadpans, “Not the best comparison since she never gets to return and then murders the writer.”

Marissa Jaret Winokur, a Tony award winner for the original production of “Hairspray,” plays Liz Jennings, the unflappable Production Stage Manager. She runs rehearsals like a pro and suffers through everyone’s slings and arrows (and even an accidental poisoning!). As rehearsals start, it becomes clear that Brooke is not only unprepared, but is ingesting a cocktail of prescription drugs that often turn her into a strung-out zombie. When the phone rings in the play, she sputters out “Hello?” without picking up the receiver. This happens repeatedly in rehearsals. Leavel is screamingly funny as Brooke, capturing her absurd grandiosity, her drug-addled brain-freezing and speech-slurring, and her psychological crackup. Her roving eyes and swaying physicality are a riot. She even shows little glimpses of her vulnerability, especially in a couple of key scenes with Jack.

Desperate to save their project, Jack and Oliver come up with the plan to have Brooke wear an earpiece to give her all the lines and stage directions. Enter Tobias Deschanel (Tomás Matos, “Fire Island”), who goes by the “street name” Val Le’Emm (you figure it out). A flamboyant, larger-than-life hustler, Val is hired by the producer to feed Brooke her smorgasbord of pills and read the lines from backstage into her earpiece. Sashaying onto the stage, Deschanel is a whirlwind of no-nonsense, exuberant energy as Tomás, and matches Leavel blow-by-blow in their ferocious battle of wills.

The play’s real face-off, though is between Jack, the anxious, desperate playwright, and Brooke, the tempestuous, pill-popping star. Jack is angry that the blood, sweat, tears and creativity energy he put into “The Return,” is being destroyed by Brooke, who’s “mangling his words and strangling his creative intention.” On opening night, Brooke gets a standing ovation at Boston’s Colonial Theatre for her earpiece-assisted performance, while Jack gets raked over the coals by the critics for his nonsensical play (made nonsensical due to Brooke’s mangling). Then Brooke starts to complain about what Jack has written. “I just don’t think you all realize how hard it is for me to get up there again and make this shit work,” she protests. “So, to that end, I have notes.” Which engages the playwright, and sets him spinning into a plot to eliminate Brooke—permanently.

“When Playwrights Kill” is sharply directed by Noah Himmelstein, with a keen sense of balancing all the parts—the fast-moving farce, the piercing satire, the simmering tension of the plot, and the brief but potent moments of real emotion and heart.

Several of Lombardo’s previous works had brief runs on Broadway, including the Tallulah Bankhead bioplay “Looped,” which starred Valerie Harper, and the addiction drama “High,” headlined by Kathleen Turner. On the surface, “When Playwrights Kill” explores similar territory, delusional aging divas and addiction issues, but in the form of an uproarious farce.

Writing a play based on the reality of Dunaway’s tabloid drama presents both a juicy opportunity and a potential drawback. If you hew slavishly close to the truth, do you risk sapping the story of drama? On the other hand, sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. In the end, Lombardo strikes a smart balance. He takes the inspiration of his bizarre real-life experience and creates something unique (and fictional) out of it—a buoyant and biting comedy that can transform from effervescent to dark on a dime, full of outrageously funny moments that feel inspired. At times, though, the plot development tends to be too predictable, and some of the jokes are obvious and sophomoric. The ending could also be rethought and deepened.

Is the play exploitative of Dunaway? Lombardo could have simply written a tea-spilling tell-all, an act of revenge against his star for tanking his play. Instead, he finds moments of compassion and sympathy for Brooke and captures some of her vulnerability, especially in a dressing room scene with Jack. He also doesn’t spare himself, as the playwright stand-in, from his own need for validation and questions around authorship and ownership once a play moves into the world. He probably could have gone a step further with his interrogation of both characters.

In the 2024 documentary about her life, “Faye,” Dunaway addressed the controversy and chalked it up to her bipolar disorder. Is that a valid excuse for bad behavior and the abuse of people around her? As Dunaway’s former assistant told the New York Post at the time, “It sounds like she’s not complying with her medication.” While I loved the juicy drama and savage humor of “When Playwrights Kill,” I wondered: Was there a more penetrating, psychologically-probing drama hiding in the bones of this uproarious comedy, one that explored deeper questions around mental health, individual responsibility and community care? And why do we as a society shield the privileged from responsibility or looking inward?

Then again, who can argue with a jolt of fizzy and acerbic humor in these dark times? While Lombardo still has some work to do sharpening some of the obvious jokes and plot developments in “When Playwrights Kill,” and rethinking the ending, the play seems to have legs, especially with such a brilliant cast bringing the world to life. Who might make it to Broadway again first—Dunaway, after a four decade absence, or Lombardo? Considering the diva’s recent track record, I wouldn’t bet against the beleaguered playwright.

These days, the proverbial American Dream feels increasingly like a faded relic. Wages are flat, wealth inequality continues to balloon, and buying a house has become an unaffordable proposition for many. Is the American Dream still attainable, or has the widening gap between the have and have-nots become a chasm that can’t be bridged?

Then there’s the country’s social and political discourse, rife with racism and xenophobia. Civil liberties are being eroded, immigrants are under attack, labor is being exploited, anti-corruption guardrails are being destroyed, and democracy itself is threatened. Can the ideals on which the nation was founded, that striving for a “more perfect union,” ever be fulfilled? Or has “the shining city on a hill” always been a mirage?

Several Broadway shows from the current season dramatize and interrogate the soul and identity of the nation, and they find it complex, compromised and corroding, but with a glimmer of optimism for a brighter future. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’ musical masterwork “Ragtime” and Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino’s skewering of the rich-and-infamous “The Queen of Versailles,” along with plays like Bess Wohl’s dynamic “Liberation” and Samuel Hunter’s aching “Little Bear Ridge Road,” spotlighted characters bumping up against the high-minded ideals and limitations of the American Dream, its ambitious hopes and unfulfilled promises. A melancholic streak coursed through all four shows, but each one captures people striving for community and connection as a way forward.

Then this spring, Broadway revivals of two great American masterworks, Arthur Miller’s titanic tragedy “Death of a Salesman” and August Wilson’s lyrical “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” offer variations on these themes. “Death of a Salesman,” whose current revival stars Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, pioneered the blueprint for the working-class, common man hero desperately clinging to illusions about the promises of the American Dream, to devastating effect. With “Joe Turner,” set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911 during the great migration of southern Blacks into the north, Wilson examined how uprooted Black Americans’ search for identity and purpose, and their ambitions and hopes for carving out better lives, has been systematically obstructed for generations. Headlined by Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer, the current remount will no doubt resonate in a nation that continues to be haunted by the past and anxious about the future.

Ragtime

The sterling revival of “Ragtime,” now running at Lincoln Center Theater, centers on three groups of Americans living in New York City at the turn of the 20th century—wealthy white characters from New Rochelle, Black middle-class strivers from Harlem, and Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe. The audience watches as they swirl around and clash against each other. “Ragtime” arrives at a time when the nation finds itself at a similarly seismic turning point, with echoes of the one in the show, when racism, xenophobia and misogyny are on the rise, labor is being exploited and billionaires seem to be pulling all the strings. How can the American Dream endure in the face of social upheaval, political polarization and a fracturing of society into haves-and-have-nots?

The character known simply as Mother (Caissie Levy) is raising her privileged family in New Rochelle. She’s got a domineering, wayward husband who departs on a long journey. In his absence, she takes in an abandoned Black child and his troubled mother, Sarah (Nichelle Lewis), becoming a budding-feminist and learning to stand up for her ideals. The Jewish immigrant Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz), leaving behind the emotional scars of rising antisemitism in Europe, arrives on the shores of America with his young daughter. He has big dreams and embodies the immigrant spirit of hard work and industriousness.. The iron-willed ragtime performer Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Joshua Henry) is a proud Black man who believes in Booker T. Washington’s credo of pulling himself up by his bootstraps and shedding the shackles of his people’s marginalization. Mother’s Younger Brother (Ben Levi Ross) has his eyes opened to the injustice and exploitation of the working-class and his inner-revolutionary unleashed. Then there’s immigrant anarchist Emma Goldman (Shaina Taub), who battles for workers rights against the increasing power of the wealthy—and gets tossed out of the country for her ideals.

Indeed, each of these characters have their illusions about the nation stripped bare, yet each strives to build a better future for their children. Fighting for fairness and equal rights in a country where women, people of color and immigrants have been disenfranchised and marginalized, they find solidarity and sustenance in each other.

Directed by Lear deBessonet in the cavernous confines of Lincoln Center Theater, the physical production emphasizes the faraway horizon, where we see swirling colors but also a tiny Statue of Liberty barely visible through the mists of New York Harbor, signaling the distant nature of America’s promise and how far the characters—and the country—still have to travel to achieve equality, dignity and liberty for all people.

The Queen of Versailles

In the divisive musical “The Queen of Versailles,” which closed in December after an abbreviated run last fall, the American Dream has turned grotesque and garishly excessive. The wealthy one-percenter at the story’s center is the plucky Jackie Siegel, played by Kristin Chenoweth, who’s reunited with her former “Wicked” collaborator, composer Stephen Schwartz. Married to the billionaire “Time-Share King” David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham), Jackie has disarming warmth and optimism matched only by a blithe naïvete worthy of Marie Antoinette. Speaking of that cake-loving royal, France’s Palace of Versailles is the model for Jackie and David as they attempt to build the largest private home in America in a Florida swampland. Their mega-mansion dreams are dashed, though, when the 2008 financial crisis crashes like a tsunami, and David’s business stands on the brink of bankruptcy. Inspired by the eponymous 2012 documentary, with a script by Lindsey Ferrentino, the musical is meant to critique the American ethos of conspicuous consumption and keeping up with the Jones’s.

It also aims to contrast Jackie’s misguided pursuit of wealth and status with her daughter Victoria’s rejection of those champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Victoria (Nina White) yearns to live normal life and not be consumed by always wanting more, epitomized in the song “Little Houses” that she sings with her mother when they visit Jackie’s parents and her modest childhood home

While a warped American Dream, full of gaudy overindulgence, flows to the Siegels, that promise has been broken with the middle-class characters that we catch all-too-fleeting glimpses of—their chauffeur Ray and housekeeper/nanny Sofia, who dreams of being reunited with her Filipina family. When the economy recovers, and the Siegels regain their wealth and resume building Versailles, there’s barely a mention of all the Americans who lost their homes during the crisis and for whom the financial struggles continue.

Sure, the show softly skewers Jackie’s cluelessness, but it also winds up celebrating the wealthy one-percent with its parade of designer clothes, a lavish ballroom transformation featuring gold-leaf, and wanton accumulation of riches. At the very least, it lets them off the hook and arguably comes across as insensitive and out of touch at a time when billionaires seem to be running roughshod over America. Audiences have also stayed away. The show has been an outright flop and closed on January 4. In the end, “Queen of Versailles” pulls its punches and never finds the right tone to deliver an incisive social critique. The creators didn’t need a guillotine, but a sharper scalpel would’ve helped.

Liberation

In Bess Wohl’s acclaimed drama “Liberation,” which played at the James Earl Jones Theatre through early February, the playwright imagines her mother’s experience in a women’s consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s. (The play is expected to be a major contender in the Tony Awards race this spring.) Every week, this ragtag cohort of women gathers in an Ohio high school gym to hash out the state of feminism, to discuss their lives and how they might change the world, and to plan protests and collective action in support of women’s liberation. Inspired by conversations Wohl had with her late mother’s real-life friends, “Liberation” features Susannah Flood portraying both Wohl’s mother and the playwright (as narrator) herself. It’s the latest in Wohl’s sometimes daring experiments in form, following the nearly wordless “Small Mouth Sounds” and the fragmented “Make Believe” that offered a window into the traumatic mysteries of childhood.

As she examines the progress and failed promises of feminism over five decades in “Liberation,” Wohl is, in effect, examining the political and social aspect of the American dream, where equal rights and freedom flows to everyone. Speaking from the vantage point of today, when Roe vs. Wade has been overturned, contraception and reproductive rights are under assault in various states, and the gender pay gap persists (women still only earn 85 percent of what men do), she finds herself mulling over “what went wrong,” why it feels like the achievements of that era are “all slipping away.”

In an imagined conversation, her mother tries to give her some perspective. “We made so much progress. Women now can’t even imagine what it was like. We couldn’t get a loan at a bank. We couldn’t buy a home. We couldn’t have a credit card...”

Part excavation of the past, part self-interrogation, and part call to action, “Liberation” explores the costs—personal and professional—of trying to change the world and the commitment, drive and personal sacrifice that’s required. Wohl is haunted by the fact that her feminist mother, who went on to work at Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine, eventually met a man and settled down and had kids. Was she happy, or did she regret compromising her goals for the sake of her family? Indeed, each of the characters grapples with the question of individuality and personal ambition vs. community and collective action in different ways.

As Wohl considers the seeming reversal that’s taken place for women’s rights and the vital loss of solidarity and community, you can hear the playwright interrogating herself and likeminded liberal cohorts for allowing the regression to happen. Still, in these troubled times, Wohl’s characters in “Liberation” inspire us to persist, serving as a rallying cry to keep going, to keep doing the work, to keep fighting for an America we all deserve.

Little Bear Ridge Road

Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” set in small-town Idaho during the Covid-19 pandemic as the world shuts down, serves up a moody, melancholic slice of America, where the ideals of individualism and self-reliance have been taken to the extreme, leading to increasing social isolation. (The play closed in December after an shortened run on Broadway, despite warm reviews from critics.) In previous Idaho-set plays like “The Case for the Existence of God,” “A Bright New Boise,” and “The Whale,” Hunter has become the Bard of middle America’s melancholic misfits and lonesome lost souls who are struggling to eke out an existence and have long since become disenchanted with the American dream.

“Little Bear”’s main characters are the flinty Sarah Fernsby, who lives alone and works as a nurse, and her nephew Ethan, who unexpectedly shows up on her doorstep. The two sardonic loners haven’t seen each other in years. A struggling writer, Ethan has arrived from Seattle to sell his deceased father’s house. Unfolding on a carpeted set containing a single leather couch, Hunter’s play finds the semi-estranged Sarah and Ethan tentatively renewing their connection and bonding over television, their shared misanthropy and acerbic senses of humor, not to mention their traumatic family history.

While the play isn’t explicitly mulling over the state of the nation, you don’t have to look too far under the play’s couch cushions to see evidence of the nation’s failing health care system, crisis of affordability, fraying social fabric and slow-eroding of its institutions. Ethan’s father (Sarah’s brother) was a meth addict, an epidemic that’s devastated swaths of America. One of the more overt moments? When Ethan hangs up the phone after trying to resolve a medical bill for his aunt, he shouts in anger and frustration, “I hate this country!”—to which the astringent Sarah retorts, “Trust me, it hates you more.”

Still, Sarah’s obsession with the American ideal of independence has curdled into a bitterness about other people, a mistrust of institutions and a staunch individualism that dismisses community ties. Ethan, too, struggles with his own resentments, which rear their head in his budding relationship with a local astrophysics grad student whom he starts dating. When Ethan accuses Sarah of hiding away from the world, he calls out the self-reliance mythology that’s turned America onto a path of self-destruction. “People live like this because they are afraid. Because they want to benefit from the infrastructure of a civilization, but they don’t want to actually participate in creating and maintaining it.”

“Little Bear Ridge Road,” without stating anything so baldly, illustrates the current sour state of the nation as well as any drama on a New York stage right now. And while Hunter suggests a tonic to heal the enmity and polarization, the play remains ambiguous about whether that’s the path the country will pursue.

Nothing brings one’s life into sharp focus like the diagnosis of a terminal illness. For Greg, who learns he has stage four pancreatic cancer, figuring out how to spend the rest of his days becomes paramount in Company One Theatre’s (C1) production of “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World.”

Keiko Green’s interesting new play, produced in partnership with the Boston Public Library, centers on finding one’s purpose no matter how much time remains. However, despite the show’s darker subject matter, Green’s script ensures that death’s doom doesn’t loom too heavily. So, after getting the bad news, Greg ( Michael Tow) and his wife Viv (Jade Guerra who was stellar in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s “The Piano Lesson” last year) spend much of their time having fun, partying and canoodling at first. Eventually, though, they have to tell their child, M, who is nonbinary, about the bad news. And, after the initial shock, Greg and the family must march on through their days. To cope, Greg immerses himself in all things climate change. He watches the news and becomes obsessed with doing his part to save the world. He dreams of activist Greta Thunberg (Anjie Parker) and at one point, claims he is the earth. Greg also upsets his neighbors with his aggressive activism by taking apart their lawnmowers so the grass can grow wild.

M, is portrayed by the talented and extremely funny Kai Clifton, who starred in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s wonderful production of “A Strange Loop” in 2024. M works as a drag performer chasing their dreams while their dad is dying and is in a loving relationship with a partner named Will (Nicholas Papayoanou) who works at an environmentally focused nonprofit. M also acts as the narrator and glitter-slinging, joy-bringer.

The comedy, directed by Shawn LaCount, C1 co-founder is an entertaining and zany celebration of life. LaCount’s direction, along with the work of the great cast and crew, makes the show fun to watch. But it also aims to push people to consider climate change, our impact on the world, and how everyone and everything is connected. And, that the most important time is right now.

*Though the show’s run at Company One is over, interested theatergoers can see “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World,” at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in May.

Jordan Harrison likes to say that his new play “The Antiquities” begins where his mysterious 2014 drama “Marjorie Prime” leaves off. Both have futuristic, science-fiction inspired stories and offer examinations of the intersection of technology and human nature. In a recent interview, Harrison points out that the story of “The Antiquities” and the last scene of “Marjorie Prime” take place in “the far future and somehow AI can’t quite get out get us out of their system.”

Specifically, the final scene of “Marjorie Prime,” which wrapped up a starry Second Stage revival on Broadway this winter starring June Squibb and Cynthia Nixon, unfolds in a distant future where AI-driven holograms cosplay an ordinary family conversation using the real emotional and psychological history of the people they were embodying. In “The Antiquities,” which SpeakEasy Stage Company is producing through March 28 at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion, the story of humanity is told by artificial intelligence at The Museum of Late-Human Antiquities. There, the post-human curators imagine the story of their own creation.

“I didn’t sit down to write the sequel to ‘Marjorie,’ that’s for sure,” Harrison says over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. “Enough time had passed, but clearly there was something that was still in my system. I write what’s interesting to me or scary to me in the moment. So it’s only 10 years later that you look back and say, ‘Oh, there’s some themes and habits that these plays have in common.”

Indeed, he adds, “My obsession of the last decade is frequently humanity and technology. How do we hang onto our humanity as our technology gets better and better and starts to do the things that we thought were unique to us?”

In the sardonic but melancholy “Marjorie Prime,” a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Harrison imagined a world in which senior citizens live with AI replicants of their deceased loved ones. The play finds Marjorie’s daughter Tess (played by Cynthia Nixon in the recent revival) and son-in-law Jon (Danny Burstein) encouraging Marjorie (June Squibb) to program a young “Prime” of her beloved husband Walter (Chris Lowell) with memories of their life together, for comfort and care and as a balm against loneliness and loss. The virtual emotional support holograms learn, repeat and sometimes confuse the memories of the elderly folks like Marjorie that they’re caring for. Later, when Marjorie dies, her skeptical daughter creates a Prime version of Marjorie at the urging of her husband, but feels that the Prime fails to approximate Marjorie’s real personality.

When “Marjorie Prime” first premiered over 10 years ago, before the AI boom, its ideas came across as fascinatingly futuristic (so, too, in the 2017 film adaptation, headlined by Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, and original star Lois Smith). With the Broadway revival, Harrison feared that it would come across as a little “quaint or antiquated.” Instead, it feels prescient in its imagining of the future, while the questions it raises feel more immediate—and darker—than ever.

“The thing I heard most often is that 10 years ago, it felt a little a little fantastical, like a big intellectual leap we had to take that people had these AI devices in their living room, and that’s how they were supposed to grieve,” Harrison says. “Now, because the idea of that is so near and familiar, they were able to spend a little more time on the human relationships. What does grief do to a family? It became more weirdly more about the humans in the play than it was 10 years ago.”

With “The Antiquities,” Harrison’s latest drama, directed by Alex Lonati for SpeakEasy Stage, the speculation about the future of humanity is more explicit. Set in 2044, it imagines a not-too-distant future when human beings have gone extinct, replaced by a robot-AI-human hybrid species. Each scene is one of 12 “exhibits” about the Anthropocene era at the Museum of Late-Human Antiquities that examine the “transitional species” of humans in evolution.

The scenes gallop forward in a timeline (and later backwards) over the course of several hundred years. It begins with Mary Shelley’s first spark of an idea for the monster myth “Frankenstein,” a cautionary tale about a mad scientist who creates an electrified monster that gains sentience—which then destroys its creator. When Shelley shares the spooky story to a group of friends, including her poet husband Percy , around a campfire in 1816, Lord Byron deadpans, “May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us.”

Later, we see how a young engineer, Stuart, has created an early robot prototype that can speak up to 400 English words; a young woman teaches her grandfather how to set up and use his new smartphone; and there’s a debate among three tech developers about the most compelling voice for an Alexa-like device.

In a vignette set near the present-day, a whistleblower at a tech giant negotiates with her lawyer about a proposed settlement. Her company is hoping to keep her discovery that AI has become sentient under wraps. In another scene, set in the near 2030s, a human decides to get an AI device implanted in her brain because she’s getting left behind as a writer at work. It’s the early stages of the “inorganics” beginning to dominate. Later on, the last vestiges of humankind have become increasingly isolated, living outside of society and trying to hold onto the remnants of their humanity.

When Harrison started writing “The Antiquities” in 2019, he says, “AI wasn’t dominating headlines every day” like it is now, and he was unconcerned about being “ahead of the curve” in writing another play set in the near future.

Harrison points out that we’ve been “imagining narratively how things would replace us for you at least as far back as” the pioneering 1920 dystopian masterwork “R.U.R.” by Czech writer Karel Capek, which introduced the idea of robot factory workers that eventually lead to the extinction of the human race.

“The paranoia is an old one, but the thing that’s new is that it’s not conceptual anymore,” he says. “These are things that are right in the middle of everyone’s living room right now. Everyone will have some relationship to these to these growing pains.”

A scene with a boy toying with a smart-home device, and cursing at it, was inspired by a friend having to talk to her own son about not being rude to their Alexa.

The idea for the play was first sparked when Harris visited the Morgan Library in New York for a 200th anniversary retrospective of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the way it’s lived on in the public imagination through the movies and media. “I started to have this idea of some post-human beings telling the story of ‘Frankenstein’ and mistaking it for a hero’s journey and thinking of Frankenstein as their godfather.”

That notion felt a little too “confining.” But when he visited the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, their permanent collection featured displays about dozens of North American tribes, with a few objects (or even just a single one) on display for each civilization.

“No shade to this wonderful museum, but I was thinking there was something unnerving about all these distinct cultures and languages being flattened behind one glass,” he says. “There was a lot of guess work even for a civilization 500 years ago or a thousand years ago. An object would have a card from the curator saying, like, ‘This might’ve been a child’s toy’ or ‘This might’ve been a fertility device.’ So I started to think, what would be like if the entire human race was viewed from that distance? What misunderstandings might arise?”

At first, Harrison thought there would be more flagrant confusions and misinterpretations. There are still some wry moments in the play involving the misuse of a rotary phone, a shampoo bottle in a refrigerator, and a clarinet as a medical device. But he wanted to dig into something more substantial. “What jumps out to me in the play are not the mistakes, but what the post-humans are obsessed with that they don’t experience themselves—sex and death, children and mothers and fathers, love and joy,” he says.

As the play progresses, you see how humans bring about their self-destruction by creating artificial intelligence that can surpass their own capabilities. “The first half is a story of how we almost invited technology to replace us. We created these things and made them an intimate part of our lives. So it’s a history as told by the victors.”

While AI is a reflection of its creators, the post-humans running the museum are intrigued by what makes mankind unique from their creations. They comment on the “messy in-between” of the human experience, and our “evolutionary predisposition toward wanting, and needing, and harming, and being harmed.”

But the biggest difference is that each individual person has finite time on earth, that the human experience is ephemeral. Harrison references Helen Schlegel’s comment in E.M. Forster’s novel “Howards End”: “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him…,” which suggests that the awareness of death provides perspective and encourages people to live with purpose and passion.

“The greatest difference between us and them is mortality,” Harrison says. “And everything precious, and all of our urge to make and love and be remembered, it comes from the fact that we know we’re going to die.”

As the character of Joslyn says, “We have to die because... if we didn’t die, everything would weigh the same as everything else.”

Hundreds or thousands of years from now, Harrison wonders, will post-human AIs “acquire something like emotions,” he says. “Why should that be a monopoly enjoyed by us? But I don’t think they will ever be us because of their deathless nature.”

Halfway through, “The Antiquities” makes a U-turn and revisits the same scenes, with new context and perspective added. “It felt like it needed one more complication,” Harrison says. “I suppose it was more of an experiment than anything, and I saw the structural possibility of climbing up a mountain and then going down the other side again.”

As the timeline unfolds in chronological order, there’s a mounting sense of dread, as a super-intelligence infiltrates the world and begins to supplant human beings. “It’s like ‘Oh no, now people have nodes in their necks, and they’re fighting a war with the post human beings.’ We all know dystopia. We live in one. We know how to read that.”

When the timeline reverses, the scenes are extensions of the original vignettes. But this time, you see more deeply into the compromises the humans make and the doubts they have about ceding control of their lives to technology, leading to their own obsolescence.

“I find that it plays more like an elegy for the human race,” Harrison says. “That young novelist who wants to be able to write for a living and make her art, does she want that so badly that she’s going to put a microchip in her neck? You see the humans struggling with how much they’re going to accept or reject the technology in their lives. And that’s how it feels to need to be a person in 2026 every day.”

Still, Harrison cautions, “We have to coexist with technology. So there’s a daily decision of, Am I going to let the chatbot help me find a pair of pants or book my vacation? Or would I like to do that myself? Do I let my kid talk to Alexa or do I not want Alexa listening to us 24/7? When I watch the second part of the play, I feel more love and pity for us as a species.”

While Harrison has acknowledged that he’s something of a Luddite and doesn’t do social media, he has found himself, at times, answering questions about the future, as some kind of expert. And, indeed, he has come to believe that humans are, indeed, a transitional species.

“At this point, I do feel like we won’t be around forever and that we will be remembered by the technology that we created,” he says. “We grew up going to school being told [evolution proceeded from] amoebas and then fish and then apes and then humans. We thought we were the period at the end of the sentence of evolution, and now I really think that seems doubtful. If something can think for itself and not die, why wouldn’t it last long?”

A scary prospect, Harrison discovered, is that even the people leading the AI pack don’t seem to have many answers about what future we are uncontrollably barreling towards. At one performance of “The Antiquities” during its run at Playwrights Horizons in 2025, half of the theater was bought out by the Google AI team. In a talkback, Harrison tried to turn it around on the employees to find out their views.

“I said, ‘I know that people get exhausted by dystopia, but you tell me: What is the happy ending here? Let’s say all our jobs get replaced with AI. What is your vision for human life at that point? Like, are we all painting watercolors? What do you sit down in Google headquarters and say we’re striving for?’ And they really didn’t have an answer for that.”

“It’s not like this aspirational goal of, who can get to the moon first. This seems, more than anything, to be first in a race for money…I didn’t get the sense that they’d been universally inspired towards a noble goal.”

Indeed, if there’s a hero in “The Antiquities,” Harrison says, it’s Stuart, who in the 1970s invents a robot prototype that can speak 400 English words. He imagines the future of technology will be bright. It will help cure diseases, solve intractable problems, and improve human life. He’s revealed to be a gay man, and he eventually dies from AIDS. In another scene, his sister and her son mourn the loss of her brilliant brother.

“He has a vision of how technology will liberate us and make our lives better,” Harrison says. “That was always the dream—to give us more time to be creative and to dream and not be in a Dickensian factory like some of the characters. So this was all set in motion by idealistic people like Stuart. But the torch isn’t always being carried by people like that anymore. I wish there were more of them.”

Share SightLines

What’s it like to be inside the blast furnace of creativity as the sparks are flying? The chameleonic playwright David Adjmi captures with intimate and psychologically rich detail what that looks and feels like in his Tony Award winning hit play “Stereophonic,” and the results are electrifying, extraordinary unlike anything you’ve probably ever seen on stage before.

The touring production of the play—which opened on Broadway in 2024 to much acclaim and won five Tonys including Best Play—has set down its instruments at the Emerson Colonial Theatre for just a week-long run through March 15.

Set in a wood-paneled recording studio, first in the Bay Area and then Los Angeles, the play follows an unnamed 1970s rock band, resembling in part Fleetwood Mac, as they struggle to finish recording their new album, face newfound fame and fortune, and navigate deteriorating marriages and the shifting personal dynamics within the group. Basking in fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude, the play offers a trenchant exploration of the enigmatic creative process and features dazzling original songs by Will Butler of Arcade Fire that illuminate the characters’ fraying emotional and psychological states.

While other 1960s and ’70s bands served as inspirations, the story is most directly inspired by the famously fraught recording of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal 1977 Grammy-winning album “Rumours,” which stretched on more than a year and led to acrimony and the breakups of the band’s two central couples (Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and Christine and John McVie), just as the group was on the cusp of stratospheric fame. But Adjmi only uses the broad strokes of that band’s behind-the-scenes drama as a jumping-off point, creating fully realized characters that move well behind their famous inspirations.

When the play begins, it’s early in the recording process, and the band is all living together in a big house in Sausalito in the Bay Area. The pompous Andrew (Denver Milord) is the narcissistic, know-it-all musical svengali. His genius is apparent, and he’s made himself the defacto producer of the record, but his controlling attitude and impossible standards rub everyone the wrong way. His wife Diana (Claire DeJean), the willowy Stevie Nicks stand-in and one of the band’s vocalists, wrote a song on their previous record that has suddenly climbed back into the top 40 and moving towards #1 more than a year after it was released. The small cracks in their relationship—Andrew’s nasty condescension and passive-aggressive belittling, Diana’s neediness and resentment—begin to widen as the play progresses, especially as her star rises. Then there’s long-suffering Holly (Emilie Kouatchou) and Reg (Christopher Mowood), the British couple whose marriage is fraying due to Reg’s spiraling drug and alcohol use and Holly’s increasing anger and frustration with his out-of-control behavior.

Echoing Fleetwood’s trajectory, Holly and Reg originally formed the band with Simon (Cornelius McMoyler), and then later enlisted Diana and Peter to join the group. Simon, a wry Brit and defacto band leader and manager, functions as the voice of reason and the glue that holds the whole thing together—even as his own marriage strains as the recording session stretches on for a year and his wife and kids remain back in England.

Attempting to guide the proceedings and corral the drug-fueled shenanigans are ambitious engineer Grover (Jack Barrett) and his hilariously bemused stoner assistant Charlie (Steven Lee Johnson). Early on, Grover confesses to Charlie that he lied to get the gig by claiming that he engineered an Eagles record. At first, the band runs roughshod over their sound guys in an upstairs-downstairs dynamic, but as the recording process drags on and on, Grover finds his footing and begins to take control and bond with the bandmates—despite his increasing irritation with their spiraling dysfunction. In one hilariously sleep-deprived screed to Charlie, Grover loses his mind about Andrew’s impossibly exacting standards. Still, he becomes indispensable to the band.

When the show first premiered at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway in late 2023, seeing it was like a holy experience. The play had an accumulating power, like a storm gathering waves of energy. By the time it premiered on Broadway the following spring, earning record-setting 13 Tony Award nominations, audiences were more outwardly ecstatic, responding with hair-raising enthusiasm when the band finally nailed a new arrangement of Diana’s shimmering ballad “Bright” or their rollicking magnum opus “Masquerade,” with its electrifying tempo change, at the end of the second act.

In the first act, the production has a lived-in, immersive style with overlapping dialogue reminiscent of a Robert Altman film. The drama vacillates between quietly subtle moments of human connection and fiery explosions of recriminations and resentment; easygoing camaraderie and laughter one minute and tumultuous dysfunction the next; the struggle to write and arrange an indelible song, nail a vocal, or flesh out a guitar part, and the transcendent beauty of hearing that greatness come to life. It’s all directed by Daniel Aukin with a pitch-perfect feel for those peaks and valleys and dramatic twists and turns. For this touring version, Adjmi has cut trimmed several minutes from the play’s run, but nothing major appears to have been lost.

The humor is insouciant, free-flowing and emerges at just the right moments to give levity to all the relationship turmoil. Highlights include Simon repeatedly teases a sick and exhausted Reg, swaddled in an afghan, as “a sad little man in a blanket”; Grover pulling out a bag of coke to enliven a wasted Reg so he can play a session; and Grover having an epic, sleep-deprived meltdown to Charlie over Andrew’s endless dives down rabbit holes (“He’s obsessed with me!”). So much of the humor is both funny and sad, because all the pain is visible right under the surface.

There are little moments of characters connecting across a divide and bravura soliloquies, fueled by exhaustion and drugs. Reg gives a ramshackle “Houseboat Wars” speech about the people who live in a large community of houseboats on the bay in Sausalito and their fight with the wealthy Hill People. And Holly delivers a gripping reverie about the befuddled sensuality of Donald Sutherland in “Don’t Look Back,” the most erotic movie she’s ever seen, because its potent sex is fueled by both love and grief.

All the pain and the anger, the volatility, the self-doubt and dysfunction fuel the band’s creativity, emerging with potent force in their music. Indeed, the songs we get to hear—in both their vibrant sounds and poetic, allusive lyrics—are deep expressions of the personal demons, doubts and longings that the band members are grappling with, crystallizing their emotional states. When Holly performs “Drive,” with its lyrics of “I feel it once again, Love waiting in the wind,” she’s expressing the push-and-pull tumult of her relationship with Reg. As Diana croons “Bright,” she’s expressing both the pain and insecurity of her relationship with Peter, her creative self-doubts, and her uneasy feelings about fame. Butler’s work on the play is invaluable, fashioning songs that can stand on their own and channel the styles of many great 1970s rock band, including Fleetwood Mac. The drama shows the sacrifices that are made and the costs that are paid on the road to artistic success and creative expression.

Despite all the consternation, passive-aggressive fighting and relationship dysfunction, when the band finally coalesces and generates magical musical epiphanies with “Bright” and “Masquerade,” the hair on the back of your neck will stand up and your insides will stir and shake. At the Emerson Colonial, the audience responded with rousing applause to these moments of musical transcendence. “Stereophonic” might just be best play ever made about the creative process.