Plays of the Spring 2024 Season
Sixteen non-musical plays opened on Broadway in the 2023–24 season, and dozens more opened off-Broadway, in commercial and institutional theaters. Most of these plays were American originals: after years of being overshadowed by work transferred from the UK, the homegrown play is showing signs of health, with multiple works addressing important issues and demonstrating masterful control over dialogue and characterization. In fact, the British transfers this season proved mostly disappointing.
Peter Morgan’s Patriots, which began at London’s Almeida Theatre, was the preeminent cross-Atlantic transfer last spring. The play is ostensibly about the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg), a mathematical prodigy in his youth who went on to make billions in the early, chaotic days after the fall of the Soviet Union. The work is narrated by Berezovsky, seen from his point of view, and structured by his rise and fall. But the play’s raison d’être is really the recounting of the emergence of Vladimir Putin, whom Berezovsky helped elevate from obscurity to political prominence, hoping to empower a second-rater who would be easily manipulated. Berezovsky is a petulant, exuberant, mercurial businessman of limited morals, and he thinks that in Putin, a stiff, colorless provincial, he’s found an ideal stooge. Instead, of course, Putin turns on his patron (or “krysha” to use the Russian term evoked throughout the play) and exiles Berezovsky from his beloved homeland.
Patriots was well received in London, winning awards and enjoying a successful extended run on the West End. It is very much in the vein of the British Journalistic Play, characterized by plots ripped from the headlines, large casts playing multiple roles, propulsive stagings, and sardonic, brisk dialogue. David Hare is the spiritual godfather of this genre, and recent examples include James Graham’s Ink (on the rise of Rupert Murdoch) and Lucy Prebble’s Enron. These shows have had mixed success in New York, perhaps because they rely on a certain exterior, precise acting style that is more prevalent in the UK. Patriots doesn’t work here, and casting is certainly part of the problem. Stuhlbarg is prodigiously talented, and he gives his all to the massive role of Berezovsky, tirelessly prancing around the stage to increasingly diminishing effect as the (over)long evening goes on. The supporting cast employs a strange mishmash of accents and never quite settles into the play’s clipped rhythms. Only Will Keen as Putin, re-creating his Olivier-winning London performance in a long overdue Broadway debut, is spot on. He brilliantly captures Putin’s awkward physicality, his protests-too-much masculinity, his seething fear of betrayal. In the first act, he almost disappears into the furniture, an unremarkable member of the large ensemble. Keen lets the inherent menace in the role grow imperceptibly, which is all the more chilling.
The intense Britishness of Patriots also makes things difficult for a US audience. A key supporting role is that of Roman Abramovich, a young, callow oligarch (Luke Thallon, also re-creating his London performance) who initially looks to Berezovsky as a “krysha” but ultimately transfers his allegiance to Putin. In the UK, Abramovich is a household name, famous as the owner of the Premier League football club, Chelsea. His entrance in the drama, set up as a gag, plays on this fame; in New York, the moment doesn’t register. The bigger problem with Patriots, however, lies in Morgan’s dialogue. The highly successful author of The Audience, Frost/Nixon, and the screenplay for The Queen, Morgan is best known as the creator of Netflix’s The Crown and—as with that show—he takes immense liberties with history, inventing conversations that simply feel implausible. Characters express their desires, their positions, and their thought processes as thesis statements. Berezovsky directly tells Putin that he has manipulated the latter’s political career so that he can have an indebted lackey in high political office, an exchange that seems unlikely to have actually happened in such a direct fashion. Scene after scene proceeds in this on-the-nose fashion, lazy playwriting that exposes the shallowness of the play’s conception.
Very much in the vein of British journalistic plays is J. T. Rogers’ Corruption, which covers the Fleet Street phone hacking scandal of the previous decade. It comes as somewhat of a surprise that, despite its British subject matter and style, the play, produced by Lincoln Center Theater, is wholly American in origin. It should have made for great political comic melodrama, with heroes and hissable villains (James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks among the latter), but Corruption is disappointing—overcrowded and undercooked. Rogers’ Oslo, which I loved, had a tight focus on the 1993 Peace Accord, seen through the eyes of two charming behind-the-scenes enablers. This new play casts a wider net, ranging across a confusing array of journalists, politicians, and assorted crooks and victims. Rogers tells the story through the eyes of the flawed, ambitious MP Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), who eventually emerges as the prime pursuer of Murdoch’s newspapers, but Watson is not a compelling enough presence to hold the evening together. A weak production by Bart Sher, and some crucial miscasting, did not help matters.
Corruption played in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center’s off-Broadway auditorium, one of many nonprofit off-Broadway spaces that are part of New York’s lifeblood. The commercial off-Broadway sector is a different animal, and it has faced huge challenges recently, exacerbated by the pandemic. But it experienced a heartening revival last season thanks to a series of hits, none more delicious than Oh, Mary!, the farcical play by and starring Cole Escola. This work comes closer to the legacy of the legendary Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company than anything I’ve seen since his tragic early death in 1987. A wild mélange of political parody, drag farce and anachronistic sketch comedy, Oh, Mary! depicts Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola) as a frustrated, slightly dim, repressed housewife, desperate to make a splash as a cabaret artist. Her long-suffering husband, President Abraham Lincoln (the excellent Conrad Ricamora), is a henpecked grouch, an angry Ricky Ricardo to her Lucy. When Mary demands he help her with her singing career, Lincoln responds that he’s busy with the war. “What war?” she responds, with an irritated eye roll. Mary, who in real life suffered from mental illness, is here a grasping, gallant, wannabe diva, forever striking poses, furiously cursing her obstructors, and dreaming of the big time. And when she finally makes it, Escola truly delivers. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a nineteenth-century first lady in a hoopskirt say “Hit it!” to a pianist and then launch into a sizzling rendition of “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
I haven’t laughed as hard as I did at Oh, Mary! in ages. It’s eighty minutes of sheer comic bliss, an absolute scream. It also became the zeitgeist hit of the spring season, an insanely hot ticket, and a magnet for star-filled audiences. I’m sure this success was what emboldened the producers to announce a Broadway transfer, but I can’t quite see how it’s going to work on the main stem. It’s a Downtown work, enhanced rather than hindered by its low budget and tiny stage. It’s also unapologetically gay. In the universe of this play, John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln are secret lovers. That kind of thing plays well to a specific, self-selecting audience but may baffle the masses. Put it this way: before the show began, a series of campy songs played on the sound system to get the audience in the mood. When a disco version of “Tomorrow” from Annie played, my entire audience sang along; it was that kind of crowd. I’m thrilled that shows like Oh, Mary! still exist in the world. It’s a bracing validation of the pleasures of extremely specialized entertainment, the kind of thing that is getting squeezed out by the algorithms of mass culture. I hope it can find a broader audience that will tune in to its unique sensibility.
Back at Lincoln Center Theater, things were a bit more sedate in their Broadway auditorium, the Vivian Beaumont, with a revival of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. The production, unfortunately, was the embodiment of what invariably hobbles American productions of canonical European plays: erratic casting. Lacking a widespread, coordinated training apparatus, American actors are generally left to their own devices when it comes to approaching text-rich classic drama. This can lead to powerful individual performances, alive with their own fire, but rarely leads to a sense of ensemble, so essential to Chekov above all other authors. This revival, directed by Lila Neugebauer, utilized a compelling modern translation by Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) and took good advantage of the magical Beaumont stage, which always seems so much larger and more dimensional than it actually is. And the play, in all its glory, shone through. It’s indestructible, whether played on a vast stage or in a tiny apartment (as in an acclaimed production last year in New York), and whether populated by a vast cast or by a single actor (Andrew Scott performed a one-man version in the West End last year). Chekov reaches into the guts of every person who has ever felt overlooked (i.e., every human being throughout history) and pulls up an astonishingly comprehensive taxonomy of the varieties of invisibility.
Would that the cast had been up to the task. Reliable supporting players like Jayne Houdyshell and Jonathan Hadary came off well. Alfred Molina was luxury casting in the small but pivotal role of Serebryakov. And Alison Pill and William Jackson Harper, as Sonya and Dr. Astrov, dug into their characters with a contemporary energy that ultimately worked, thanks to their intelligence and intense commitment. Commitment was not enough for Steve Carrell, however, the marquee name in this revival. His traversal of the title role was sadly bland, inoffensive in the early scenes but completely unconvincing in Vanya’s explosion at the end of the third act. Equally inadequate was Anika Noni Rose, a usually terrific actress, who was gorgeous but oddly pallid as Yelena, a role that requires a bewitching charisma. I’ve seen an array of spectacular actresses in this role, so the bar is high: Julianne Moore, Helen McCrory, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Dizzia, Laura Linney, and, above all, Cate Blanchett. Rose—poorly costumed by Kaye Voyce—struggled to convey the sense of an exquisite chaos agent, inadvertently destroying lives around her as she attempts to articulate her own needs.
Neugebauer’s production was a disappointment, following her superb work on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate at Second Stage Theater. The play had first appeared off-Broadway a decade ago in a largely forgotten production. This revival, prompted by Jacobs-Jenkins’ subsequent successes with his plays The Comeuppance, Gloria, and particularly the marvelous An Octoroon, shone a new light on the work and was an unqualified success. Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of the New York Times, in fact, wrote a mea culpa review which largely explored why he hadn’t liked the original production but now loved the revival. Surely the sensational cast, led by Sarah Paulson giving the performance of the season, was a prime reason for the play’s renaissance. Times have changed, too. The play, a wild roller coaster of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, taps into a particular tonal mix that resonates in this post-pandemic moment: a combination of outrage and helplessness, of pitch-black humor and heightened emotionalism. Much like Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, Appropriate peels back the layers of hypocrisy and buried secrets in an extended family, gathered in a large, old family house over the course of a few days. Although all the characters are white, the specter of race plays a major role, as it does in most of Jacobs-Jenkins’ work.
Three siblings—Paulson as rage-aholic Toni, Corey Stoll as blustering Bo, and Michael Esper as perennial screw-up Franz—gather with their significant others and children to mourn their late father. As surprising artifacts are discovered among their father’s belongings, and as recriminations and unpleasant surprises surface, the family members argue in thrilling ways, employing soaringly furious rhetoric to push each other to extremes. Paulson’s Toni spends virtually the entire play at a pitch of rage so hot that I marveled at her ability to sustain eight performances a week. Even more stunning, however, were her final moments on stage when a wave of exhaustion and resignation washes over her, and she retreats to a devastated monotone for a long, despairing monologue. This was acting at a high order, remarkable work for an actress who has grown appreciably in my estimation from her misguided performance as Laura in the 2005 revival of The Glass Menagerie. But Paulson’s extraordinary work did not overshadow that of her fellow cast members, particularly the always excellent Stoll, and the remarkable young Alyssa Emily Marvin as frustrated teenager Cassidy. Only Elle Fanning, as Franz’s dippy girlfriend, disappointed, and when the production transferred to a larger theater halfway through its run, she left the production, replaced by Ella Beatty.
Much of Appropriate’s success lies in the sense of urgency that Jacobs-Jenkins imparts—you feel that this play had to be written, that it’s expressing something important about our world. But why did Paula Vogel write The Mother Play? The new three-hander, subtitled A Play in Five Evictions, had its world premiere on Broadway, a rarity these days, in a star-studded production featuring Jim Parsons, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and the sublime Jessica Lange. It’s a family drama, profoundly influenced by (or derivative of?) Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Lange plays Phyllis, the narcissistic, alcoholic mother of Martha and Carl. The play begins with the children aged 12 and 14 and Phyllis recently abandoned by a philandering husband. Broke and bereft, she and the kids move into a vermin-ridden apartment. The play spans several decades, dropping in here and there as the family moves from dwelling to dwelling, and the children age, revolt, depart and regress. Phyllis is titanically needy, but also hardy, canny, vibrant. She’s a life force, and the relationship between her and her children is fraught, to say the least. Scene after scene depict a precarious dance of love, rejection, and reconciliation.
Vogel has made it clear that the play is autobiographical; she is Martha, and Carl is her older brother, who died of AIDS in the ’80s. Vogel in fact already depicted her relationship with her brother in autobio-theatrical terms in her first major play, The Baltimore Waltz (1992), a far superior work to The Mother Play. This new play feels like a therapeutic attempt to understand and exorcize the legacy of a mother who was clearly difficult. Phyllis reacts with furious disapproval to Carl and Martha’s respective revelations of their queer sexuality, and we can imagine that Vogel’s mother probably had a similar reaction. But the play never coheres as drama, feeling instead like a series of journal entries by a daughter who’s trying to make sense of a mother she resents and loves. Tina Landau’s tonally erratic production, which included bizarre dancing cockroaches, doesn’t help matters.
There were compensating pleasures. The ingenious set, designed by David Zinn, perfectly captured the feeling of constant relocation. Couches, chairs, cabinets, and tables on casters were rearranged by the cast, each new configuration delineating a new apartment, the details of each blurring together in the children’s minds. Phyllis and her family, as the play’s subtitle indicates, are constantly evicted, but each eviction carries thematic weight. In some instances, the instigation is Phyllis’ aggressive attitude toward her landlords. By the end of the play, this aggression is directed toward her children—most devastatingly toward her sick son, whom she “evicts” because she lacks the strength to handle the final stages of his illness.
All of this makes The Mother Play sound much better than it is. The extended chronology of the plot, rather than conveying a sense of epic sweep, feels scattered and fitful. No scene is given time or context in which to resonate; everything feels summarized. More problematic, little in the play feels freshly observed. The parent who disapproves of her child’s homosexuality, the beloved sibling who contracts AIDS, the shy child who finds her voice as a writer—all these tropes are overly familiar, and therefore powerful only when a writer taps into a sense of authentic expression. Vogel, an excellent playwright on many occasions (How I Learned to Drive, Indecent), has not done so here.
The always reliable Keenan-Bolger weaponizes her intense earnestness to make Martha the moral center of the story. Parsons is problematic. As an actor, he’s invariably wonderful company: charming, smart, wry—you want to be his best friend. This role requires him to collapse into histrionic despair, and he’s simply incapable of doing so. His tears feel calculated, not earned. There’s always a sense of him standing outside the character, a stance that’s effective in comedy, even in brittle drama like The Boys in the Band, but fatal in Vogel’s sincere dramaturgy.
Lange, in her own way, is as stylized as Parsons, but her approach allows her to be successful, if not completely coherent, in this role. Lange is a messy, sometimes scattershot performer, more akin to a Dionysian genius like Vanessa Redgrave than to a technically immaculate Apollonian like Meryl Streep. You feel like she is inventing every moment as it happens, or at least experiencing it herself for the first time. She’s not afraid to stumble. And yet she never seems lost or outside the diegesis. Her unearthly beauty, potent still at age 75, pulls your attention. But her fierce emotional intelligence is what holds that attention. Lange has a much-discussed scene toward the end of The Mother Play in which Phyllis, having alienated her children, comes home to her lonely apartment. For a good ten minutes (an endless stretch in stage time), she silently and listlessly sits, wanders, broods, completely at loose ends. It takes an actor at the top of her game to pull this off, and Lange makes it the highlight of the play.
The Mother Play’s greatest sin might be that it doesn’t aim very high. It feels like a play that Vogel needed to write for herself and then should have put in a drawer. Personal excavation can of course lead to masterful work. But sometimes a play can seem completely impersonal and yet still immensely powerful. Such a work is Stereophonic by David Adjmi, which began at Playwrights Horizons in the fall and transferred to Broadway in the spring. Clocking in at well over three hours, Stereophonic could profitably lose twenty minutes. But it’s still the best new play of the season, a relentlessly engrossing look at the recording of a seminal rock album in the mid-1970s. The band and the album are fictional, but clearly modeled on Fleetwood Mac and their epochal Rumours, still one of the best-selling records of all time. Like Fleetwood Mac, the band in Stereophonic comprises three men and two women, some American and some British, all uneasily adjusting to newfound fame and wealth. The play minutely observes the small alliances and disruptions, the micro-betrayals and affirmations, coursing through a group of young, insecure people who are deeply involved in each others’ personal and professional lives. A harried sound engineer and his goofy assistant complicate the mix. Copious drugs are consumed.
I’ve rarely seen a production so immaculately coherent. Every actor is on the same page in terms of style, energy, and tone. And every creative element is in sync, not least the dazzling sound design by Ryan Rumery, which uses the varying studio spaces in David Zinn’s meticulously conceived set as thematically charged chambers of sound and silence. Director Daniel Aukin, inspired by Adjmi’s highly naturalistic dialogue, takes a Robert Altmanesque approach, as if he’s letting us observe and eavesdrop through a discreetly placed camera and microphone. Scenes begin in the middle of conversations, discussions overlap, arguments end without resolution. We could be watching a documentary comprised of B-roll footage. Much of the play is taken up with multiple, fragmented takes of the various songs, all written for the play by Will Butler of the group Arcade Fire. The play foregrounds the craft required to create a great rock song—the science of the sound mix, the nuances of the rhythm, the potency required for the vocals. The results are clear as we hear the songs come together, all, astonishingly, performed live by the cast.
Singling anyone out from the superb ensemble would be unfair, but over the course of the play, sympathy migrates toward Diane, the lead singer, played by Sarah Pidgeon. The character, who seems most likely of the group to break out into a solo career, is based on Stevie Nicks, who indeed did break out from Fleetwood Mac. Diane is under the thumb of the band’s leader, Peter (Tom Pecinka), a vain, touchy control freak, the type who brutally criticizes everyone under the guise of “just wanting to make what we do better,” complaining that he’s the only one who really cares about the music. We all know the type. Diane’s eventual assertion of her independence is a victory, but, like everything in this play, complex. Breaking away is good for Diane, but the action leaves damage in its wake. Success, progress, affirmation—all are desirable, and messy, in Adjmi’s carefully constructed scenario.
Stereophonic capped a season that also saw such excellent new work as Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, both transferred to Broadway from earlier off-Broadway productions, and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s superb Public Obscenities (originally produced by Soho Rep and seen at Theatre for a New Audience) as well as Kate Douglas’ mind-bendingly strange The Apiary (at Second Stage). Sturdy revivals included Sam Gold’s production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, led by a perfectly cast Jeremy Strong, channeling that quintessentially Ibsenesque figure Anthony Fauci. And John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, an impeccably constructed potboiler, worked its perennial magic, shifting the center of gravity in this Scott Ellis revival from Sister Aloysius (an underpowered Amy Ryan) to the accused Father Flynn, compellingly played by Liev Schreiber. All of this work, well attended and well received, affirmed that non-musical drama can continue to thrive in the New York theatrical ecosystem.