Polyamory has been a hot topic in so much of the modern discourse on dating that it’s hard not to feel wary when a play promises to tackle the subject. Danger and Opportunity, Ken Urban’s new play, involves a married gay couple who introduces a third partner into their relationship—a woman!—but its exploration of love and desire in our modern era transcends the surface-level discourse and probes at the deeper questions of intimacy and identity, even when it falters. 

It’s an intimate play, making the East Village Basement the perfect venue. The audience sits in the living room of Christian and Edwin’s posh, if not bland, Manhattan apartment. As Edwin puts it: “Christian, you love to pretend you’re some socialist sex radical, but you like expensive things and you’re, um, vanilla.” Frank J. Oliva’s scenic design perfectly captures this sensibility.

Edwin is ribbing his husband in front of their guest Margaret, Christian’s ex-girlfriend from high school who he hasn’t seen in 20 years, and as the evening progresses Christian might just prove him wrong about his pedestrian desires. 

Over three-and-a-half years, Christian and Edwin try to make Margaret fit into their marriage, often with surprising success. As Edwin, Juan Castano is touching as a man who finds that his life is forever changed by Margaret’s unexpected arrival in his relationship. For starters, he’s never been with a woman before, but, beyond that, he begins to explore his past in ways he never thought possible. 

Ryan Spahn nails the neurotic anxiety of a certain kind of gay man preoccupied with getting older—it doesn’t help that Edwin is younger than him. However, his bid for polyamory isn’t a case of trying to keep up with the young folks, it comes from a deep well of love for both Margaret and Edwin. Urban doesn’t try to pin down or spell out his characters’ sexualities, which gives the play space to explore what it means to be in love.

Julia Chan is the standout of the trio. Her Margaret is guarded and insouciant. She’s a professional who has learned not to let her emotions get the best of her, but as she grows closer to both Christian and Edwin, she opens up before us to reveal someone beautifully human. Chan is a remarkably present actor. Being so close, the audience is able to catch her every passing emotion, each cock of the eyebrow. You never feel like you’re listening in on these private conversations more than when you’re watching Chan.

At the helm of this production is Obie Award-winner and Theatrely31 alum Jack Serio, who deftly keeps the action moving without unnecessary blackouts or scene changes. Even when a character isn’t in a scene, Serio has them sitting nearby or floating on the periphery, like ghosts haunting the space. Working in tandem with Stacey Derosier’s warm lighting design and Avi Amon’s seamless sound design, Serio has created a world that lets the audience in. He uses every corner of that space, lending the production a verisimilitude that heightens the intimacy. 

However, even with Serio’s dexterous direction and a 90 minute running time, the play sags. Too many of the scenes are written at the same languorous pace. Given its title, the play lacks any kind of danger and, though well-acted, the trio fails to generate much of a spark. 

Queer couples are often derided for their permissiveness in their, to borrow a word from the script, “monogam-ish” relationships. Urban dispenses with judgment and gives us the chance to see the beauty that comes with letting someone else in, along with the heartbreak.

Danger and Opportunity is at the East Village Basement through April 20.

For the first third of Good Night, and Good Luck, a new play based on the 2005 film, I appreciated being made to lean in. As in the movie, which was written and directed by George Clooney, here stepping into the lead role of the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, a battle is waged against media illiteracy. By 1958, he believed this country had become “fat, comfortable, and complacent,” rapidly losing their ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and entertainment, and when and how to care. It follows, then, why director David Cromer’s production begins quietly, asking us to consider each detail with Murrow’s level of attention. But its book, co-written with Grant Heslov, is ultimately too slight to care to analyze.

It’s too bad, considering the pertinence of the story, which follows a monthslong pas de deux between Murrow and Joseph McCarthy at the height of the senator’s Red Scare. Aggrieved by the politician’s showboating lies, Murrow fights back on air to the chagrin of studio head Bill Paley (Paul Gross) and his profiteering investors. Their back-and-forth is cleverly portrayed through a mix of Clooney's onstage addresses, delivered mainly into a live feed shot (by Daniel Kluger) through several screens throughout and beyond the proscenium, and archival footage . The approach emphasizes what’s here, in fact, and there, across a possibly corrupted media, and initially seems almost (delightfully) academic in its distancing.

But while Clooney’s charismatic talent carries him smoothly through his Broadway debut, and I won’t begrudge him a commitment to multimedia, you begin to feel a bit cheated witnessing over half of his Broadway debut through screens. (Even from the vantage point of my prime orchestra seat, he is mostly blocked by cameras and other performers.) And what’s around his story – an office romance (between Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson), an espionage subplot with Murrow’s co-producer (Glenn Fleshler), and a somewhat distastefully underexplored incident with a fellow journalist (Clark Gregg, a warming presence) – first feels dangerously intriguing, then like padding.

Up to the challenge, Cromer crowds Scott Pask’s stunning set – the old CBS studio at Grand Central Station – with the sights and sounds of an ever-humming office. There’s always someone agonizing over the editing bay, manning the well-appointed control room upstage, or men in trench coats walking on a catwalk above the main action. There’s even a lovely singer (Georgia Heers) crooning for the listeners at home, marking time for those in the theater. To be fair, it is a rare joy to see a stage as huge as the Winter Garden’s populated with a large cast for a straight play. But it's equally disappointing to squander the Broadway debuts of two magnetic talents, that of Glazer and the downtown theater jewel, Will Dagger, with so little to do.

For its few gems of amusement, the play has an uneasily patronizing relationship with what it views as trivial. To punish Murrow for his muckraking, Paley assigns him a puff piece on Liberace which, after it screens, provides a punchline for Murrow to look absolutely dejected. The patrician Clooney strikes this pose beautifully (especially under Heather Gilbert’s b&w-inspired lighting), but it’s one of many moments in which entertainment is made a punching-bag straw-man for our own supposed apathy. (I Love Lucy and, perplexingly, Beyoncé also later come under fire in a final montage.)

And really, isn’t the production’s whole conceit more or less the Liberace puff piece equivalent of Liberal backpatting, righteous and sometimes rousing as those moments here can be? Clooney acquits himself nicely, though better as a stage actor than writer, and perhaps best of all as a figure worthy of examination, himself. Paley warns Murrow that, morality aside, his editorializing has opened the door for unqualified on-air commentary. Having long waded into political waters from the Hollywood pool, Clooney has coolly mastered both bodies, dignity intact. He’s a star, and a clearly intelligent one. But for all its subdued rippling, his play of Good Night, and Good Luck charts mostly still waters.

Good Night, and Good Luck is in performance through June 8, 2025 at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in New York City.

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.