The Art of Life 

Three shows dealing with parents – one on, one off-, and one off-off-Broadway – opened this past week. There’s no right way to bring up a child, or way of knowing how it’ll turn out.

Eureka Day - Manhattan Theatre Club at the Friedman Theatre

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster” is advice playwrights looking to critique Millennial Liberalism would do well to heed, as evidenced by the two beasts to which Jonathan Spector’s 2018 comedy Eureka Day mostly loses in its bright and bubbly Broadway premiere.

The first monster it encounters is thematic. As with last season’s The Thanksgiving Play, which mocked a well-meaning elementary school drama teacher’s attempt to mount an even-handed history of the holiday, there are only so many laughs you can wring out of liberal cluelessness. Here, it’s the board members of a bougie California day school when faced with a mumps outbreak among its students. They’re the sort of people for whom things like “holding space” and “feeling seen” are paralyzing conundrums instead of useful frameworks in the fight for equity. The jokes at their expense start off strong but lose steam quickly, despite strong performances from a cast including Jessica Hecht and Thomas Middleditch.

The second is structural. About halfway through the play, the group hosts a live-streamed town hall to discuss options with the other parents, whose comments appear on a wall behind the cast (projected by David Bengali). The parents’ increasingly unhinged online behavior is wildly funny; Anna D. Shapiro’s staging receiving its biggest and most constant laughs as the audience waited for a new bubble to pop up. But though the onstage dialogue is largely irrelevant – they might as well be saying “rhubarb rhubarb,” I confirmed with the script later – I still felt I was robbed of a live experience. My mind also began to wander: How have parent-teacher relations shifted in the online age? Are parents acting out against educators, the way people might do anonymously on Twitter, and then still leaving their very real children in their care? Will we ever get a grip on our online actions?

It’s not that the play, which is set pre-Covid, fails to address this so much as it cannot bear its weight, and so bringing in that scene feels detrimental to both its experience and its message. I couldn’t bring myself to care much about the onstage antics after this, nor were any laughs fresher or louder. Parents will likely have greater laughs of recognition, but I found myself skimming over other tabs left open in my mind.

Annie - The Theater at Madison Square Garden

Whoopi Goldberg as Miss Hannigan! The beloved musical (book by Thomas Meehan, music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin) is in fine shape in this touring production currently stationed at the gargantuan theater inside MSG. Though the space means the staging, directed by Jenn Thompson, must sacrifice some intimacy, Wilson Chin’s set and the to-the-rafters performances ensure the material gets its proper dues. (Ken Travis’ sound design, though, at least from where I was seated, amplified the orphans’ chorus to a level of shrillness I cannot recommend to the Uncle Jockos among us.)

Hazel Vogel is an unusually soulfully voiced Annie, who finds a sweet counterpart in Christopher Swan’s Daddy Warbucks and especially Julia Nicole Hunter’s sensational Grace. Savannah Fisher more than earned the applause she received throughout her terrific turn as Star-to-Be.

Despite underselling her own performance while promoting it on The View, Goldberg sang and sold her comic lines with much more gusto than I’d anticipated. She also offers a curious take on Hannigan, adopting a servile tone when speaking to those who held power over her character. It’s a curious (and, for a production otherwise unconcerned with matters of class and race, appropriate) choice that beefs up her involvement from stunt casting to star turn. If that View non-endorsement came from a place of shyness, then her performance here points at a promising future run of delightfully assured featured roles onstage.

Racecar Racecar Racecar – The Hearth at A.R.T./New York Theatres

A casualty of the Connelly Theatre shutting its doors to provocative plays, Kallan Dana’s reversible new play follows a daughter and father (Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie) on a cross-country road trip from New York City to their native Sacramento. It’s a trip they’d done years before, and the play relishes in the palindromic: the two pass the time listing off examples and noting the things they’d experienced before that might be coming back to haunt them, like their at-times tense relationship to each other, and to alcohol. The reverse bits get increasingly more Lynchian, with backwards-playing music and surreal interactions with a ragged drifter (Ryan King), a pigtailed little girl (Camila Canó-Flaviá), and a Wendy’s employee named Wendy  (Jessica Frey, absolutely scene-stealing).

Brittany Vasta’s set is an enviable conversation pit around which characters walk and, against the upstage wall, cleverly flash lights through paper cutouts with city names (by Normandy Sherwood) to signpost the duo’s location. The road trip reaches an absurdist peak when Dana’s language leans hardest into word association to refract the daughter’s fractured mental state, which slowly reveals a more vulnerable core. The specificity of her trauma becomes a bit too confessionally therapeutic, bordering on therapy art, but Sarah Blush’s direction is brisk without undermining character or intention.

Eureka Day is in performance through January 19, 2025 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Annie is in performance through January 5, 2025 at the Theater at Madison Square Garden at Pennsylvania Plaza in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

‍Racecar Racecar Racecar is in performance through December 22, 2024 at A.R.T./New York Theatres on West 53rd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The template of the family reunion drama springs as eternal as the American myths it continues to address. Joining that lineage at the Broadway level is Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, first performed in 2018 and now making its New York debut at the Hayes Theatre in a starry, captivating production directed by Trip Cullman. With great wit and gently gestured thematic breadth, it tackles the country’s thrall to its righteous, morally dubious origins through the contentious return of a deeply Christian Connecticut household’s offspring on Christmas Eve.

It opens with most of the Dahl family already assembled on John Lee Beatty’s cozily decorated living room set, snow idyllically dancing outside. The characters are plenty and easily distinguished, though not simplistic. Ginny (Mare Winningham) is the matriarch who downplays her husband Bill’s (David Rasche) deteriorating dementia in favor of the holiday’s nostalgic power. This, despite the fact that three of her four children keep contact to a minimum. There’s Mark (Zachary Quinto), a seminary-taught lawyer who now leads an urbane life with his Jewish-born wife, Rachel (Molly Bernard); Evie (Rebecca Henderson), the second eldest and most fed up, especially with how her conservative parents handle her recent marriage to Pippa (Roberta Colindrez); and Johnny (Christopher Sears), a recovering addict no one’s seen in years who, when he arrives with the last-minute addition of his younger friend, the heathenly Zillennial Loren (Barbie Ferreira), does so with child-like sugar-rush intensity.

Diana (Shailene Woodley), the youngest, married a cloying pastor, James (Christopher Lowell), and has been living with her parents as they prepare for the birth of their second child. With blonde, virginal locks and a faux-humble maternity gown, even Norman Rockwell would find her too much (kudos to Liz Printz’ hair and Sophia Choi’s costume design), and it’s clear she’ll be the one driving the ideological wedge between the family with the fixed smile of a street corner proselytizer. Despite stones being thrown from each house with increasing precision and destruction, Diana’s is the only one the parents seem to protect, much to the others’ chagrin. The performances are all-around sterling, with Ferreira and Woodley the most conspicuous of the debuting Broadway cast, alongside Bernard, Henderson, Lowell, and Sears.

The Dahls are predisposed to joining together in a number of Christian songs, as they so joyfully once did, and Headland relies a bit too heavily on this idea of the communal power of music to offer temporary reprieves from their arguments. (“Children, Go Where I Send Thee,” with its cumulative structure, seems to go on forever, though Loren hilariously cuts into that scene’s sickly sweetness by offering that many of these Christmas carols are “co-opted spirituals” originally sung by slaves.) But they are nicely sung and arranged and, as it happens, their contributing to the production’s sometimes lumpy pacing joins forces with the reunion’s discomfort to create an appropriately realistic gathering.

Mark is a similarly unsettled beast. For a while, it seems he is the least fleshed out of the characters, decidedly cosmopolitan yet never really taking a stance against his family’s judgments. But he delivers the sharpest, most clear-eyed reads, and is slowly unveiled to be, not poorly sketched, but rather the most conflicted. At the heart of Cult of Love is a bleak acknowledgement of the current existential impasse in the fight for America’s soul. The country loves its roots, however homicidally evangelical, enough to repeatedly reach across a chasm that has grown frustratingly vertical, from aisle to wall. No matter how many times their counterparts show where their values lie, the progressive Dahls continue to hope they will be validated in their efforts to recover the clan’s old glory, even as they appraise it in troubling terms. Mark emerges as the central figure caught in this battle: an American Orpheus, a lapsed Gatsby. Can’t repeat the past? Headland’s play deftly claims we’re doomed if we beat on.

Cult of Love is in performance through February 2, 2025 at the Hayes Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Bathsheba Doran’s haunting and deceptively complicated play “Kin,” which had its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2011, is a wise choice for a new theatre company’s inaugural production. For Making Our Space Theatre Co., it’s an auspicious debut. 

Directed with tender ingenuity by Spencer Whale (Lempicka, Vile Isle), this moving production reminds us that to know another person may be impossible, but it’s always worth it to try.

“Kin” is a love story told unconventionally. Our lovers, Anna, an intellectual poet, and Sean, an Irish personal trainer, are rarely given any alone time on stage. Instead, through a kaleidoscope of vignette-like scenes, we learn about their relationship and personal histories from their community: their families, their friends, even the ancillary characters they never meet provide insight into what it means to be two people searching for love and connection in the modern age.

While “Kin” takes place largely in the early 2000s, when Facebook was still a novelty, Doran’s play, paired with Whale’s deft hand, foregrounds the difference between then and our present, while still making clear that the anxieties and complexities of human relationships have gone unchanged. 

When Anna (Sophia Castuera) tells her best friend Helena (Ellie M. Plourde), an underemployed actress, that she’s looking online for a new boyfriend, Helena bemoans “the machine” that picks out our mates for us based on the criteria we input, rather than leaving such a decision to chance or fate. While dating apps have become commonplace, we can identify the present woes of our increasingly atomized and algorithmized lives. Still, it’s what brings Anna and Sean (Eli Mazursky) together and leads to their blossoming love.

This is not a love characterized by unrealistic tropes—blind devotion and unwavering faith. Throughout the play, both Anna and Sean are riddled with doubt about the viability of their relationship and their own commitment to it. As we learn about their families, it’s no wonder why. Sean was raised in Ireland by his mother Linda (Melissa Hurst), whose descent into agoraphobia after an assault drove Sean’s father away. Conversely, Anna’s mother died when she was young, leaving her in the care of her military father Adam (Timothy Wagner), whose icy stoicism drives a wedge between himself and his daughter. Our lovers’ models of romantic love are tainted by the trauma passed down through their broken families.

But “Kin” is more hopeful than that. It’s a play dedicated to showing us that no one defining event makes us who we are. We park ourselves in one story, letting our past dictate who we are today, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When Sean visits his ex-girlfriend Rachel (Yuka Taga), whose brush with death due to their shared use of drugs and alcohol haunts him, we gain insight into his ambivalence about Anna, whose love doesn’t carry the same intensity for him. He’s also able to let go of Rachel and that time in his life. Sometimes, it takes those around us to show us what’s real. 

There are at least four other characters in this play that I’ve yet to mention. A lesser playwright wouldn’t be able to carry such weight but Doran has created a rich ensemble of multifaceted characters without overstuffing the narrative.

Because we learn most of what we know about Anna and Sean through the people that surround them, they are the least articulated characters in the piece. Castuera and Mazursky work beautifully to define the central pair of lovers as they are not as well-developed by Doran as the others. 

Plourde is hilarious as the chatty and sometimes vapid best friend. She continues to shine in some of the play’s most raw moments, displaying an impressive range of skills. Hurst, as Sean’s mother, maintains all aspects of her character’s humanity, including her warm wit, never devolving into a caricature of mental illness. Whale has given his actors the space to explore every aspect of their characters, even the messy and unlikable parts.

Michael Lewis’ scenic design, coupled with Yichen Zhou’s inventive lighting design, creates a liminal space for these scenes, which stretch from various places in the United States to Ireland. With its exposed wood, half-finished walls, and packed boxes, is it a house still being built or one that has fallen into disrepair? As these characters come together and fall apart, the answer keeps changing. 

“Kin” is a rare gem of a play and this production captures its virtuosity. It’s funny yet poignant, both simple and complicated, unafraid to be messy. It’s deeply human. I’m excited to see what’s next for Making Our Space Theatre Co.

“Kin” runs through December 21st at The Chain Theatre.