For their inaugural production at Studio Seaview, Seaview has announced that John Krasinski will return to the New York stage in Penelope Skinner’s dark comedy Angry Alan, directed by Sam Gold. The limited 10-week engagement will begin May 23, 2025 with an official opening night set for Wednesday June 11. 

Roger is divorced, demoted, and drifting—lost in an era that no longer makes sense. But when an online personality promises clarity, Roger dives in without looking back. Timely, provocative, and darkly comedic, Angry Alan explores one man’s journey down the digital rabbit hole—examining how far he's willing to go, and how much he's prepared to lose, for validation in a world where “everybody’s changing the rules.” 

“I couldn’t be more excited to be returning to Off Broadway, and to be surrounded by such a force of talent in Penny and Sam is quite literally a dream scenario,” said John Krasinski.  

The play will feature scenic design by Tony Award nominee dots, costume design by Qween Jean, lighting design by Tony Award nominee Isabella Byrd, sound design by Tony Award nominee Mikaal Sulaiman, video design by Tony Award nominee Lucy MacKinnon, properties by Addison Heeren, with Niamh Jones as associate director, Kate Wilson as vocal coach, and dramaturgy by Sarah Lunnie. Production stage manager is John C. Moore, with production supervision by Hudson Theatrical Associates / Sean Gorski and Seaview / Jonathan Whitton serving as general manager. Casting by Taylor Williams, CSA. 

Sign up at AngryAlanPlay.com to join the exclusive 24-hour pre-sale beginning at 10:00am ET on Wednesday, April 2. General on-sale will begin at 10:00am ET on Thursday, April 3. 

In her New York directorial debut, LaChanze returns to the work of Alice Childress, in whose play Trouble in Mind she fiercely starred on Broadway in 2021, renewing interest in the writer’s under-seen oeuvre. This time, she stages her 1969 play, Wine in the Wilderness, in a smart Classic Stage Company production featuring a sizzling Olivia Washington.

Amid the Harlem riot of 1964, the suave young artist Bill (Grantham Coleman) is looking to complete the third panel of a triptych he’s painting on Black womanhood; the first canvas depicts youthful innocence, the second an idealized African mythos. The third, he heartily rhapsodizes with Oldtimer (Milton Craig Nealy), a friendly wino who breezes into his studio, will be a cautionary tale of the kind of “messed up chick” you’d cross the street to avoid.

This is why Tommy (Washington) is picked up at a bar and brought over by his friends Sonny-man (Brooks Brantly) and Cynthia (Lakisha May). Brash, lively, and not dripping with bohemian chic, they see her as the perfect model of Black womanhood gone wrong. With Oldtimer quietly observing, the three friends take turns slighting her looks, intelligence, and lifestyle while toasting their own advancement.

As in Trouble in Mind, which patiently laid bare the workplace microaggressions faced by a Black actress, Childress is interested in everyday culture wars, here the ones waged within a subculture; what we take from our people and how we sell them out in our quest for advancement. Tommy drinks, doesn’t know the African-American history books strewn about Bill’s apartment (the intimate set is by Arnulfo Maldonado), and definitely does not use the term “African-American,” opting instead for one which deeply, and showily, offends her host. But she’s no social work case, and is definitely no stooge. When, in a woman to woman moment, Cynthia advises she should soften up and become the kind of lady men open doors for, she fires back, “What if I'm standing there and they don't open it?”

There is a compelling conversation between Childress’s writing and LaChanze’s contemporary direction. The script doesn’t insist too hard, but it’s easy to imagine its subtext calling for these characters to be presented in a more caricaturish way which LaChanze is measured in tempering. So while Dede Ayite’s costumes and Nikiya Mathis’ wigs are characteristically rich, Tommy does not immediately read as the stereotype her peers perceive her to be. It’s a humanizing touch, trusting the author’s dialectics and her star’s ability, but one that softens the play’s blunt-force legibility. And yet LaChanze then continues this artists’ dialogue, complicating Childress’ too-clean finale with a poignantly unsettled closing tableau.

Four years after her incandescent performance in Trouble in Mind – which was both the veteran actor’s first time leading a Broadway play, and the 1955 work’s long-delayed Broadway debut – it feels as if LaChanze has clutched onto something beautiful in the elder’s work, and is now passing it forward. Washington, catching the baton, creates a performance that is compelling, evocative and all-encompassing; suggesting a woman determined on being life, whether of the party or of her own path. Out of this well-calibrated, finely acted production, the triumvirate of Washington’s performance, LaChanze’s direction, and Childress’s words, make it a must-see.

‍Wine in the Wilderness is in performance through April 13, 2025 at Classic Stage Company on East 13th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The uber-prolific Kenny Leon has somewhat perfected his directorial strategy of casting extremely well then getting out of the way of his talented performers, trusting them to deliver the work cleanly, and largely on their own. If a bit of nuance goes unexplored here, or some text feels hurried there, he typically pulls it off on the strength of the material. It worked with a rollicking comedy like Purlie Victorious, it worked with an emotional meditation like Our Town. The approach does not work with Othello, his third Broadway show this season, which stumbles aimlessly and fruitlessly for nearly three hours.

Shakespeare’s works will outlive us all, but need a reason to be staged, a focus on one of the many thematic strands each contains, and through which they remain immortal. Though Leon’s two previous Shakespearean outings, both at the Delacorte, had specific takes on character and setting, there is nothing powering his Othello, leaving its two blockbuster leads, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, stranded.

Gyllenhaal wrangles emotion out of his Iago, if he’s not completely at home with the Bard’s language. Washington, in a statement as baffling to write as the performance was to witness, seems to have little hold on crafting his character. This Othello does not carry the triumphant stateliness of an army general victorious over general circumstance and pointed racism, but rather the affable nature of an easy mark. When the scheming Iago suggests his new wife Desdemona (Molly Osborne) might be untrue, he falls for it immediately, sapping the bonafide thriller of any sense of tragedy. Andrew Burnap, meanwhile, is rather impressive as Cassio, with Anthony Michael Lopez and Kimber Elayne Sprawl also making the most of their Roderigo and Emilia.

It would be ludicrous to imply Washington and Gyllenhaal are incapable of turning in momentous, gorgeously attuned performances, so one searches for a directorial hand that emerges in other, bizarre ways. The set, by Derek McLane, whose structural minimalism is well-suited to the modern-dress costumes (by Dede Ayite), is simply not pleasant to look at, with columns sophomorically sponge-painted to suggest age. And Justin Ellington’s sound design vacillates clunkily between melodramatic, Disney-sounding strings and modern trap beats.

An introductory projection places the action in “the near future,” apparently one where the United States has invaded the story’s Venice, given the conflicting military and police patches worn onstage. This scene-setting appears following the magic trick involving Desdemona’s handkerchief which opens the show. Long before the accessory figures into Iago’s plot, it hangs mid-air against a blank stage before the performance begins. As it is invisibly whisked into the flies, the magic, drama, and knowing purpose that the gesture promises disappears almost as immediately.

Othello is in performance through June 8, 2025 at the Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.