To stage David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2025, starring Bill Burr, Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, would appear to be a huge win for the meninist movement. Your brother’s favorite TV stars cursing up a storm as real estate agents engaging in all sorts of chicanery to stay at the top of their food chain? The Palace Theater fills itself. And yet, for all its promised brazenness, this latest production of the 1983 play (its third revival in twenty years) is a curiously cucked rendering of a piece which requires all-cylinders machismo to fire off.

Director Patrick Marber presents a cleaner, more low-key take on the material. His is not the livewire sleazefest which has allowed actors like Al Pacino, Joe Mantegna and Bobby Cannavale to find poetry in peacocking. The pace here is set by their successor, Culkin, who deploys his shtick of frazzled, hair-tousled stammering into a sales asset, luring marks into his trap the way a conspiracy video turns raised eyebrows into slow surrender. As with this production, it’s a quieter tactic that works – it gets the play through to the end of the story successfully – but is not one delivering anything other than what’s immediately onstage.

Say what you will about Mamet (the less, the better, at this point), but his material works so long as it is allowed to dive as far deep into the mud to find some sort of insight into the brokenness of bravado. The cursing, the backstabbing, the nastiness should all spell out, in bold and all caps, the grossness of his characters’ worlds. Paradoxically, that sleaze also tempers the effect of their worst behaviors; here it’s casual racism. Grotesqueness tuned down and an overarchingly inoffensive relatability allowed to prevail, their extended forays into bigotry come off as just edgy humor from lovable rogues instead of the words of the damned.

Burr commands that middle ground, a natural with the acidic rhythm of Mamet’s language, but has too few scenes to display it. (Same with Michael McKean, in a less showy role.) And though he fares better in the second act, Odenkirk stumbles into his aging, pathetically unlucky salesman, never capturing the character’s life-or-death desperation the way it was immortalized, if sideways, in The Simpsons’ collar-tugging Gil Gunderson (himself based on Jack Lemmon’s film portrayal).

Not much is at stake for these alleged sharks, who glide through the lofty waters of Scott Pask’s two sets. Having to blow out this small piece to fit this massive theater, the ornate Chinese restaurant of the first act and the office of the second reflect comfort, not the cesspool that could breed the Darwinism their actions involve. Polished, starry, and with nothing to say, this Glengarry sells a McMansion, neither a scam nor a Palace.

‍Glengarry Glen Ross is in performance through June 28, 2025 at the Palace Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

After 2020, as pandemic restrictions were beginning to loosen up, Jessica Hecht was looking to create a piece about, as she puts it, “what it is to be a mother, and also somebody who is political in spirit but doesn’t find her voice until later in her life.” Walking around the Strand bookshop, she stumbled upon a play she’d first encountered in high school, where she never fully grasped its meaning: Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother. The experimental 1932 work, one of his “learning plays,” follows an illiterate, working class mother who finds herself at the center of a revolutionary struggle thanks to her son, whose radical thinking worries, then galvanizes, her.

The play’s theme, newly rediscovered, resonated with Hecht. Having worked with refugee communities around the world with her Campfire Project program since 2017, it brought her back to the mothers she met at a Greek refugee camp, at the height of the Syrian civil war, who were desperate to help build a future for their children.

This weekend, as part of Baryshnikov Arts’ 20th Anniversary season, Hecht will debut A Mother, an adaptation of Brecht’s work co-conceived with, and written by, Neena Beber. Featuring original songs and choreography, the play sets the action in 1979 Miami. It was an era she remembers well from frequent visits to her grandparents down South, when she was discovering love and disco months before the police murder of a Black man ignited dayslong riots. Also starring in it, the piece honors Brecht’s didactic, distancing effect by weaving several threads: the play’s narrative; Hecht’s personal history, alongside that of her family, who migrated to the U.S. around the time the work was written; and scenes surrounding its original Berlin production.

Theatrely caught up with Hecht a few days before the work’s premiere.

What’s your relationship with Miami?

My grandparents were working-class Jews from the Bronx and moved to Miami Beach, like a lot of people did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I had very formative times with them going down to these apartments in the ‘70s, which were largely [inhabited by] old Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust and now lived in these apartments up and down Ocean Avenue, before that area became hipper than hip. Back then, it was really all Jewish, Black, and Latino communities. So we set the play in 1979 and 1980, when I am both being completely turned on to the idea of being in the theater and spending these weeks in Miami Beach, where I had my first crush. It all goes down in Miami in the era of disco and the city really exploding. It was a fabulous time; clubbing and Versace and all these people coming down there to explore this whole other side of the city. I really remember the collision of those two worlds.

Most of those people were in the last twenty years of their lives and a lot of them lived out the rest of their lives in isolation. People stopped coming and it became very dangerous for a short period of time because, during the Mariel boatlift, Castro let out all of these people from jails and mental hospitals, in addition to any Cubans who wanted to leave. So these elderly people were panicked to leave their apartments at night. And that wasn't all completely true, some of it was just fear. It's terrible, as I think about it, because you realize all the bullshit that our government is putting out about these immigrant groups that is completely untrue. It's interesting how these seeds get planted and create this idea in the collective consciousness that these immigrant groups coming in are the product of countries trying to get uncomfortable populations out. That is absolutely not what's going on now, but it was sort of what was going on in Miami at that moment.

It's always interesting, and can be emotionally fraught, to look back at the things that were happening around you when you were young. Did anything stand out in your research?

We placed it in 1979-1980 because this very seminal event occurred in Miami at that time. It was the murder of a Black man, Arthur Lee McDuffie, by a group of Miami-Dade police officers that became a real media explosion, and then later sparked very serious riots in Liberty City, a Black enclave in Miami. There are riots in the play, and moments in which you feel the presence of thug-like police officers who come in and totally trash this old woman's home. These riots, during that winter that I was there, were very, very affecting. I mean, I vaguely remember this case, but then when Neena brought it up... I watch these videos, and there's actually a famous reggae song about the Liberty City riots because the whole city was burning. It was like the Rodney King or the George Floyd events, but before we had this real awareness. Arthur Lee McDuffie was a Marine and he was just pulled off his motorcycle and brutally beaten to death. That actual event colors the piece. And McDuffie’s mother – now we've now seen mothers repeatedly pleading, in the media, for an end to this violence. This was certainly not the first of this kind of murder, probably the millionth, but in many ways it was the first to be so well covered by the media. 

Tell me a little bit about conceiving A Mother.

I went to the Strand looking for something I could perhaps collaborate on with Neena Beber, who I’ve worked with for many years. We’d have these Zoom sessions where we would talk about how we could adapt this. Our very first idea was to have three different mothers, one from Latin America, one from the Middle East, and one American. We’d do improvs around how this could manifest, and I started telling stories about my own family and my grandmother's history, who was a very defining character in my life. We did that for months, and then the Orchard Project got involved, then Baryshnikov Arts. These improvs kept going, where we would record ourselves talking about our own experiences, and then we would read the play with six actors, and then we'd go back to talking again. We'd do these recordings to see how the play actually affected us, how it lived in us. Then Neena cobbled together a script based on these improvs and these investigations.

Had you thought of including movement into the piece before Baryshnikov became involved?

I did synchronized swimming and modern dance for a bit when I was a teenager. It kept coming up during development and I said I don't want to manifest any kind of quote-unquote dance, but we should have some way we move which allows us to engage with the audience in a physical way. So I asked Misha Baryshnikov and his wife Lisa if they had any suggestions, because I was in a production of The Cherry Orchard with him which had movement at that time. Watching him work on a play was so inspiring because, although it's not dance, there's this way in which he creates a character through movement which is so defining. Lisa wasn’t available but suggested their daughter, Shura, because she works a lot in the theater and she's an incredible choreographer. There is some disco choreography, synchronized swimming on land and some teen theater camp choreographies that live in the piece.

How are you finding a physicality in this? When I think of Brecht, I think of intellectualism.

It's so wonderful because we're finding all of this physicality by placing it in Miami Beach. I have these women of that era that I knew so well, who were in their 70s, but were in this warm, club-like environment. So they had a kind of renewal of their femininity, albeit in the form of an elderly person, but a little sexy. What's very interesting is that Brecht’s actual style was not as stiff as people think. We have this remarkable recording of the Berliner Ensemble production of The Mother in 1934 that my friends showed me. My friend Solveig Schumann, who’s the daughter of the person who created the Bread and Puppet Theater, is married to Sebastian Brecht, Bertolt’s grandson. So the grandchildren of these bohemian icons married, and that's how I got a lot of information about the Berliner Ensemble and these early productions. The style is much more natural than you would ever imagine. The bodies, the physicality is a bit formal at times, but the quality of the emotion, not that they are emotional in a contemporary sense, or like you’d seen in an Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams play, but they are extremely accessible storytellers. They're very simple in their production style, and very gentle. There is a kind of emotion because they use the language to tell these stories, so you hear the mother character often saying to her son, “Please don't have your friends come here in the middle of the night. I'm so worried that the police will come. Please, please my son, please listen to me.” If you just do it simply, you're sort of recognizing that the plaintiveness is coming from this real understanding of this old world fear, and the clarity of their journeys. Of course, we're talking about language that's translated, but I promise you, he wrote in a much more emotionally compelling way than we realize.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A Mother is in performance through April 13, 2025 at Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Back in 2021, a shutdown-era digital adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray skilfully transplanted Oscar Wilde’s classic into our present-day maelstrom of internet virality and social media fame. Utilizing “content” streams and straight-to-camera monologues, Henry Filloux-Bennett’s take (presented by the UK’s Barn Theatre, among others) tied-in Instagram, filters and Snapchat to witty effect, finding a clear—if perhaps unsubtle—contemporary resonance to Wilde’s satire on our beauty-obsessed society. 

One senses, in Kip Williams’ new solo iteration of Dorian Gray, now on Broadway following an acclaimed run on London’s West End, a natural hesitation to hit the nail so squarely on the head. Not that Williams shies away from technology—his production makes heavy use of video projections and live camera feeds, a style the Australian director has dubbed “cine-theater.” But all that modern tech collides, here, with fabulous period costumes and Wilde’s florid prose, preserved in Williams’ adaptation. 

For a time, that deliberate clash is delightfully overwhelming to the senses. But as Williams’ elaborate staging careens towards Dorian’s tragic end, you may find yourself more exhausted than moved; always impressed, but never quite transported. 

Certainly this Dorian Gray is an astonishing technical achievement. A powerhouse Sarah Snook, fresh off HBO’s mega-hit Succession, plays all the parts in the 2-hour, intermission-less spin on Wilde’s novel, a horror-infused fantasy of eternal beauty’s curse. Snook achieves that feat by performing opposite many pre-recorded versions of herself, projected on a multitude of screens that glide above and around the stage. Snook herself is also trailed by a hard-working camera crew, her own transformative work sharing the same screens with her pre-filmed selves. 

It’s all expertly choreographed, and the interactions between live-Snook and her video selves are remarkably seamless. (The video work is by David Bergman.) But Williams’ cine-style quickly grows distancing and repetitive. Too often, Snook herself is out of view, available only by video; a few times she even leaves the stage entirely, leaving us alone with a recording. These choices suck the “liveness” out of the event. That distance is further heightened by the soap opera crispness of the video itself—the quality is distractingly crisp, to the point where I wanted to grab a remote and turn off motion smoothing.

One solution to the “liveness” problem is showing your audience the work, an approach favored by digital theater artist Joshua William Gelb for a recent in-person staging of The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy. Williams hits on that magic only in certain scenes, including a years-spanning  sequence of Bacchanalia that brings the video operators into the party (a fun idea that, sadly, the production only deploys once). 

Wilde’s source text is perhaps distancing by its nature. Do we need to feel empathy for Dorian? That arguably requires viewing him as a tragic cipher, robbed of personhood by a society uninterested in his inner self. That was the perspective taken up by Filloux-Bennett’s 2021 take, which cast Gray as a victim of social media’s power to destroy. 

Again, one can see why Williams shied away from such an on-the-nose reading. But the production’s overall hesitance leaves its perspective on our modern toys in an uncertain place, more confused than nuanced. When Snook snaps a selfie and starts playing with filters, the final result (projected above her) just looks wacky, reminiscent of Jim Carrey’s huge-chinned look in The Mask. Snook toggles back and forth between this clownish caricature and her own face, as though some point was being made—I confess that it eluded me. 

It’s hard not to hold Dorian Gray up against Andrew Scott’s Vanya, another West End import now running downtown at the Lucille Lortel. With simple staging and no fancy effects, that solo staging draws out the clear and beating heart of Chekhov’s text through a single, lonely body on stage. Of course, the demands are different, as Wilde’s novel demands some camp fabulousness—and in this regard, Williams’ team does indeed provide. Marg Horwell’s mini-sets (quickly wheeled in and out) are brightly colored delights, while her innumerable costumes are all delightfully ostentatious creations. 

Yet Snook, though tremendously bawdy and having a great time, does not find a legible Dorian to center Williams’ breathless staging. There is a brief moment, near the play’s conclusion, when live-Snook finally gets the stage to herself. As she speaks to us directly and without adornments and Dorian confesses his fear and deep self-loathing, a bit of humanity does start to seep in. 

Yet all too quickly, the screens slide back onto stage, taking over again for a bravura finale. The show’s conclusion is an astonishing technical display by Snook, the camera crew and the magicians backstage. But as we’re busy being awed, it’s easy to forget what story is even being told. 

‍The Picture of Dorian Gray is now in performance at the Music Box Theatre on West 45th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.