Storms of April

The RSC brings "King Lear" to BAM Harvey director by the RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and starring the inimitable Antony Sher in the title role.  Sher's performance is idiosyncratic and engaging but the performance of the night is that of Pappa Essiedu at Edmond, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, solidly enacted by David Troughton.  Essiedu is already making a name for himself at the RSC and one can see why here.  His Edmond is a pure evil, a textbook sociopath.  Sexy, smart and soooo laid back, he easily manipulates his father and his naive and trusting brother Edgar.  His seduction of Goneril and Regan is smooth, effortless if you will.  In his performance one can see a callous college frat boy chocking up his wins and sneering at the ease of it. In another stand-out performance, Antony Byrne brings a youthful buoyancy to the part of the older Earl of Kent,  Lear's most loyal  subject and protector.  I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast.  Mimi Ndieweni's Cordelia is pretty much by the book,  Nia Gwynne's Goneril is weak, Kelly Williams Regan is cartoonish  and Oliver Johnston does not give Edgar/Mad Tom the complexity the role requires.  Graham Turner as Fool also disappoints in a role that is usually a win-win.  His performance is disjointed and one never feels his real despair over the banishment of Cordelia.  But Essiedu's Edmond is more than reason enough to weather through the four hours at The Harvey.

The revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW forty years doesn't come together this time around.  Directed by Rachel Chavkin a NYTW Usual Suspect and whose work I generally admire even when the material falls short, this "Light" fails to shine.  Chavkin has assembled a motley crew of actors of various ability and training and it shows.  An old trouper like Vinie Burrows who was a delight at 89 as Mustard Seed in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dreams" is not matched in talent or ability by the other cast members with the exception of the height-challenged actor Matthew Jeffers who engages and delights in his various roles. Even Rob Campbell who is a regular in Churchill's plays disappoints.  It feels almost as though he is saying "This is an amateurish production.  What am I doing here?  Why even try?" Evelyn Spahr in particular is appalling as she mugs her way through various roles in this period piece about the Civil War in England in 1642 led by Oliver Cromwell.

"Dance Nation" at Playwright's Horizons and directed by Lee Sunday Evans is Clare Barron's latest and, while I thought that her two previous plays "You Got Older" and "I'll Never Love Again" were superior,  the risks she is willing to take like the cross generational casting of her teenaged protagonists, a devise she used to ever better effect in "I'll Never Love Again," have electrifying results.  The play is searing in addressing the pain of female puberty and how that pain plays out later on in life.  This is where her use of actresses of different ages to play the seven young dancers really clicks.  Lucy Taylor the 40ish actress playing Ashlee alone on stage and spotlit, delivers a devastating monologue that carries her from her 13 year old self to the sexually unsure mature woman she has become. The monologue destroys... But everyone in the cast is excellent from Eboni Booth as the insecure Zuzu who is expected to fulfill her mother's dream to Dina Shihabi's Amina, the star dancer of the company who realizes that she must build a shell around herself if she wants to succeed.   There's a moment at the beginning of the play that that is intentionally reminiscent of "A Chorus Line."  The audience recognizes this and it brilliantly sets the stage for what is to come. Barron has the ability to mine other plays for bits that she makes her own.  I continue to be astounded.

April Is Not The Cruelest Month

Glenda Jackson in "Three Tall Women" is magnificent.  Reason enough to see the current revival on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. Also, Albee.  Directed by Joe Mantello (usually not his biggest fan having disliked intensely the recent critically acclaimed "The Humans" and "Blackbird") with recent Tony winner Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill (miscast IMHO), Albee's play soars on the the wings of Jackson's performance. "Three Tall Women" is Albee's letter to his mother, a wealthy socialite who adopted him as an infant but failed to nurture him and rejected him for being a homosexual.  But this is not a harangue.  It feels rather as if Albee understands and even admires his mother if at times she feels like the devil  She's not a nice woman but does that matter?   In the first act the 90 (or is it 91?) year-old A is confined to her room and attended by B, a health-care aide (Metcalf), and C, a young lawyer (Pill) who has been tasked with attending to her bills.  In the second act Pill and Metcalf play A at earlier stages of her life with varying degrees of success.  Metcalf is convincing but I didn't believe Pill in that role. It's hard for either of them, superb actors that they are, to measure up to Jackson even after her 22 year hiatus from the stage.

Bedlam's "Pygmalion" (on which "My Fair Lady" is based) is also not to miss although you will probably have to.  The show closes after a very limited run at The Sheen Center on Bleecker street on April 22nd and is currently sold out. Bedlam is able to populate whole universes with 4, 5, 6 or 7 as they do here.  Shaw was a genius at creating strong women characters, ones who don't need men to give them a feeling of self-worth and it is especially evident in the character of Eliza Doolittle, here played to perfection by Vaishnavi Sharma who appeared in two previous Bedlam productions, "The Seagull" and "Sense and Sensibility."  Eric Tucker not only directs but is outstandingly irritating as Henry Higgins and Beldman regulars Edmund Lewis and Nigel Gore return to play Mrs Higgins and Henry Pickering respectively as well as a host of other characters.  The newcomers to Bedlam are Annabel Capper as the exquisitely imperious Mrs. Pierce and Rajesh Bose as the unctuous but charming Alfred Doolittle.  What a joyful production. 

Then hasten to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center to see Lauren Ambrose make the role of Eliza Doolittle her own.  While watching "Pygmalian" I kept expecting the characters to burst into song at any moment.  Here they do!  Who knew that Lauren Ambrose had a voice to rival Kelli O'Hara's (who I must admit I had imagined in the role)? Norbert Leo Butz has a raucous and engaging turn as Alfred Doolittle; "Get Me To The Church On Time" is always a show-stopper.  But every word, every song of this great musical is imprinted on our memories, those of us of a certain age, and it's thrilling to hear them sung to such perfection.   Bartlett Sher, who it seems directs every musical at Lincoln Center (his "South Pacific" and "The King and I" were both extraordinary),  has put together a marvelous company that includes, in addition to Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering and newcomer Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill.  There's nothing like a musical at Lincoln Center when it's done right.

You may have already missed seeing Billie Piper in "Yerma" at the Park Avenue Armory.  Hers is a tour-de-force performance but the Lorca play doesn't really work as reinvented for yuppies in today's London.   Lorca's "Yerma" is specific to a time and place (1934, Spain) when a woman's most important role in life was to be a mother.  Her descent into madness is the result of her inner struggle with not being able to fill this role.  Transposed to a yuppie professional woman in her 30's who has only just had the idea that to complete her life she must have a child when she has never wanted one before, does not like children and has no motherly instincts, it fails to make sense.   "Her" as she is called in the current production simply wants something that she is unable to have. She goes mad for not being able to get what she wants but it's really not about having a child. She would have found something else to obsess on that would drive her over edge if having a child was taken out of the equation.  She is spoiled and entitled and I had very little sympathy for her.  However, the production, as directed by Simon Stone, is beautifully staged in a glass/plexiglass box with audience on both sides and the performances are all terrific. 

The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Travesties" directed by Patrick Marber with Tom Hollander is a miss in my book.  The revival of Stoppard's 1974 play about an English official, Henry Carr, in Zurich during WWI who has either real or imaginary encounters with James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin, all in Zurich at the time, misses the mark.   The performances are uneven and the play never reaches the frenzied pitch it requires in order to embrace the absurdity of the subject.

Do you need to go to every Shakespeare production on in New York?  Then you could do worse with Theatre for a New Audience's "The Winter's Tale" directed by Arin Arbus.  See it, if only for Anatol Yusef's powerful  Leontes, the jealous king who exiles his loving wife and condemns her newborn daughter to death but lives to regret it.  Or better yet to see Antigonus, in Shakespeare's arguably most famous stage direction,  "Exit, man pursued by a bear."

Backwards Through March

I saw Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," in a sense, backwards.   Two weeks ago my flight to New York from Berkeley was canceled so I didn't make it back in time for Part 1: Millennium Approaches although I did catch Part 2: Perestroika the next night. I was later able to snag a single ticket for Part 1 so, in a sense, I saw it backwards. As always with Kushner, I was blown away by the breadth of his intellect and the magnificence of his stagings.  For anyone who doesn't already know, the play addresses the issues of mortality, specifically with respect to the AIDs epidemic in the 80's when there was little hope for a cure. The acting, under the direction of Marianne Elliot, is tight. The revival comes to Broadway after a hugely successful sold-out run at The National Theatre in London. It should be no surprise that Elliot has directed several of the most original plays in recent times:  "Heisenberg," "The Curious Incident..." and "War Horse"  and I look forward to her upcoming revival of Sondheim's "Company." In keeping with the recent National productions of "War Horse" and Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," Elliot makes great use of sophisticated puppetry for the Angel who was played by Amanda Lawrence in Millennium Approaches and by her understudy Glynis Bell in Perestroika, both wonderful.  It's hard to single out a performance above the others from this mostly British cast.  Everyone on Broadway appeared in the National Theatre production except for Lee Pace as Joe Pitt.  Seeing the plays backwards had a curious effect on me.  Performances that I didn't respond to in Perestroika moved me in Millennium, specifically Pace and James McArdle as Louis and Andrew Garfield's Prior Walter seemed to have more depth.  However, other performances I found more nuanced in Perestroika: Denis Gough's Harper Pitt,  Susan Brown in her incarnations as Mormon mother and Ethel Rosenberg, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the magnificent nurse/friend Belize, a part that Geoffrey Wright owned in the original production. But this was especially true of Nathan Lane who brought much of his schtick from "The Producers" to the character of Roy Cohn in Millennium Approaches and let it fall away in Perestroika. Ethel singing a Jewish lullaby to Cohn on his deathbed was always and will remain my favorite moment in the the play. 

The Vineyard Theatre Production of "Harry Clarke" which recently moved to the Minetta Lane Theatre is an absorbing and entertaining one-man show. I'm not big on one-man/woman shows but the play, by David Cale, about an accidental conman is fun and Billy Crudup delivers a stunner of a performance as the duplicitous and possibly sociopathic title character.  Leigh Silverman who helmed another recent excellent one person show with Marin Ireland, "On The Exhale," directs. You're in for a bumpy ride.

Go see "This Flat Earth" at Playwright's Horizons, a musing on the effects of a mass shooting in a suburban middle school. The playwright Lindsey Ferrentino is having a moment.  She has two plays running simultaneously ("Amy and the Orphans" is currently running at the Roundabout).  Directed by Rebecca Taichman who directed Paula Vogel's "Indecent," "This Flat Earth" supposes a school shooting in a middle school in a posh suburb on New York.  How timely.  The play was of course written before the Parkland shootings but after Sandy Hook and the countless others.   It's a play about a 13 year old girl and the end of innocence.  Ferrentino was herself inspired to write the play from her own experience as a naive 13 year old at the time of the attacks on the twin towers. The performances are all stellar, especially newcomer Ella Kennedy Davis as the 13 year old Julie.  I don't know how old the actress is but based on her still-developing body certainly no older than 14. She has talent well beyond her years. Watch for her in the future.

You can miss "The Lucky Ones" at Ars Nova unless, of course, you are a 30-something living in Williamsburg and nostalgic for "Hair" and "Godspell."  I was not a fan of The Bengsons recent autobiographical show "Hundred Days" at NYTW for some of the same reasons I could not respond to "The Lucky Ones," the self-indulgent naval-gazing for starters.  I have to say I'm a little disappointed with the fine director Anne Kauffman( "Sundown, Yellow Moon," "You Got Older," "Mary Jane") for hitching her star to their wagon. The pointless hippy dippy dance sequences only made this production worse in my opinion, Kauffman's idea or the Bengsons'?  Their music is not terrible though. Perhaps they should try to write about something other than their own personal experiences.

Wrapping up February

Edward Albee's "At Home At The Zoo:  Homelife & The Zoo Story" at Signature is a pretty perfect evening of theatre.  Directed by Lila Neugebauer, who directed the stellar "The Wolves" at The Playwright's Realm last year, and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Paul Sparks and the divine Katie Finneran, this is an evening of pure intellectual and artistic satisfaction.  The scenic design by Andrew Lieberman takes the Cy Twombly squiggles that serve as a backdrop for the exploration of a marriage in  "Homelife" and replicates them in the pattern of the park benches in the encounter between two strangers in "The Zoo Story."  Albee always forces us to dig deeper and to think more about our preconceived beliefs of who we are.   Signature is often hit or miss but they always get Albee right.  Bravo!

The latest offering from The Playwright's Realm is a bit of a miss although an enjoyable one.  Since their above-noted production of "The Wolves" and the equally impressive but less lauded "The Moors" their offerings have not been up to the mark.  In Don Nguyen's "Hello, From The Children of Planet Earth" a lesbian couple who are having trouble in their attempts to conceive contact a male classmate and friend of one of the women, now a NASA scientist keeping track of  the Voyager satellite, for help.  Jade King Carroll adeptly directs the able cast but the subject matter is pretty old-hat.  I feel like I've seen this play many times before.  The most interesting aspect of the production is the character Farthest Explorer portrayed here by Olivia Oguma who as Voyager 2 muses about the universe from their place in space.  I suppose there are parallels to be had to the situation on Earth but mainly I just enjoyed her performance.

"Hangmen" at Atlantic Theater Company is Martin McDonagh's latest, coming on the tail of his enormous success as writer/director the Academy Award nominated "Three Billboard Out of Ebbing, Missouri."  I wasn't a fan of the film but his plays, most recently the "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM, are always powerful. "Hangmen," which had it's debut at The Royal Court Theatre in London, has retained it's director Matthew Dunster and much of the original cast including the mesmerizing and edgy Johnny Flynn as Mooney, a presumed rapist and murderer, and Mark Addy as Harry, one of the hangmen in question.   Ultimately the play is a Wild West story of vigilante justice, superb in it's telling.

The Soho Rep is finally back in their home space on Walker Street with "Is God Is" by Aleshea Harris.  The play is directed by Taibi Magar, who most recently directed the acclaimed "Underground Railroad Game" at Ars Nova.   Twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire set by their father are sent by their dying mother who they barely know to find him and murder him.  Dame-Jasmine Hughes and Alfie Fuller are terrifying as the sisters but then everyone in this gothic revenge play is pretty terrifying. I also couldn't stop feeling the influence of Sam Shepard throughout. Props to Soho Rep for producing a really fine play with black characters, a black playwright and a black director.  That's what I call making it real.  I'm back on board with Soho Rep!

I hate to end this blog post on a downer but Joshua Harmon's "Admissions" at Lincoln Center is a total fail in my book.  The subject is tired and the direction and acting do nothing to raise the material.  The son of the white admissions officer at an elite (but second-tier) prep school whose mantra is diversity is not accepted to the Ivy of his choice but his (half) black friend and classmate who has lower grades, test scores and fewer extra-curriculars has been.  Crisis for the privilaged white family!  Yawn.  The biggest problem with the play though,  directed by Daniel Aukin, is that there are no people of color in the cast.  Or the audience at the performance I attended.  I don't even know what to say about that... 

Easing into February

I think it's the enda Enda for me.  With "Ballyturk" at Saint Ann's Warehouse Enda Walsh returns to a set-up he used in "Arlington"(also at Saint Ann's Warehouse) of characters trapped in a room in the perhaps not-so-distant future "waiting", obviously an homage to another well-known Irish playwright whom we need not name.  And to add to the already yawn-worthy premise he uses the Ivo Van Hove trick of throwing garbage all over the stage for what reason I'm not sure although it's quite the thing these days.  The fictional village of Ballyturk and its occupants that the two trapped characters create recalled Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood" and gave me a glimmer of hope that the play might have something other than its fatalistic outcome up its sleeve but it was not to be. However, the performances by Tadhg Murphy, Mikel Murfi and Olwen Fouere as a third character (the devil?, angel of doom?, god?) are superb.

"He Brought Her Heart Back In A Box" from the African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy currently at Theatre for a New Audience is admirable if a bit static.  It stars two young Yale School of Drama graduates Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka and is directed by Evan Yionoulis, the resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre.  Unfortunately the 45 minute play feels more like a history/civics lesson on race relations in the South than a window into Kennedy's person history. The 1940's.  A boy.  A white boy.  A girl.  A black girl. A black girl who can "pass."  A love story.  A tragedy.  You can guess the rest.  However, Christopher Barreca's scenic design is delicious. a single long staircase divides the set representing the divide between the lives of the characters which they must not but do cross.  The lighting by Donald Holder is dreamlike and Justin Ellington's score which incorporates period songs and Noel Coward's "Bitter Sweet" is hypnotic.  And it's worth the trek to Brooklyn to see what the 86 year old Ms. Kennedy is up to even if it's not such a much. It's still a much more than most.

"An Ordinary Muslim" directed by Jo Bonney now in previews at NYTW is just that: ordinary.  Hammaad Chaudry, a first time playwright from Edinburgh has nevertheless amassed quite an impressive string of playwriting awards for a thus far unproduced playwright so forgive me for expecting more.  I felt no empathy for the central character Azeem, the spoiled son of an Anglo-Pakistani family.  He is "an angry young man" struggling with what it is to be a Pakastani in England and, although his is a real dilemma, the character does not look to any solutions other than to reject everything that is offered him and Sanjit De Silva was unable to make his character likable or even understandable.  Andrew Hovelson as Azeem's work friend David who bends over backward to support his friend and Angel Desai, who briefly appears as Azeem's sister Javaria, are the only characters who elicit any sympathy.  The plays follows a pretty straightforward narrative and there's not much original to be had here.  The Pakistani Joe Orton Chaudry is not.

"Returning to Reims" now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse is more of history lecture than a play until the last 15 minutes but you may have fallen asleep or zoned out by then.  This is not to say that the content is not interesting but it's not theatre. An actress called Katy, Nina Hoss, arrives at a recording studio and immediately starts to record the narration for a documentary.  The confusion begins when we discover about 20 minutes in that the narrator is a gay French man, the French writer Didier Eribon, and not a straight German woman so all our assumptions up to that point we must discard.  This is just one of the ways the director Thomas Ostermeier attempts to straddle the bounderies of gender as well as nationality and political thought but it's just confusing as opposed to revolutionary.  The documentary within the play follows Eribon's autobiographical book about growing up gay in a working class enclave of Reims, France.  He not only records his own development but that of the working class and their move from political progressiveness to the embrace of the nationalist movement and Le Penn.  There are certainly parallels to the current climate in this country  and in this sense the play is timely and presumably the reason for the production being presented here.  Hoss is an exquisite actress (If you haven't seen the 2014 film "Phoenix" set in Germany in the aftermath of WW2 add it to your Netflix queue) and even given the relatively flat delivery of the narration her voice is intoxicating.  But the real meat of the play comes in the final 15 minutes or so when Hoss begins to tell the her own story and we discover that her father is Willi Hoss who himself came from working class beginnings and went on to co-found the Green Party in Germany. In my opinion this should have been the the beginning...

Ah, January

Fiasco's "Twelfth Night" at CSC started out my year on a leaden foot. This is probably the most performed of all of Shakespeare's plays for the simple reason that it is almost impossible to ruin.  Well, it happened.  I am so unimpressed with this company that was born out of the Brown/Trinity MFA acting program.  In an interview in the program, the company founders, Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld,who also are co-directors of and actors in the play, state that they have been "heavily influenced by the work of Cicely Berry and Andrew Wade" who "opened our eyes to the purpose, structure, and rhythm of prose." Aside from the fact that Shakespeare ain't exactly prose, nowhere in the current production is this in evidence. One would think that classically trained actors, even in the U.S. would have more of feel for and understanding of the language of Shakespeare.  Instead, the actors, most notably Emily Young who plays Viola,  awkwardly gesticulate and punch out their words.  The only solace I found was in the musical interludes.  I plan to pass on this company's future productions.

But all is well in the world after seeing "Farinelli and the King" at the Belasco Theatre.  The play, written by Claire Van Kampen and directed by John Dove, is a sensory joy.  Mark Rylance has always been too hammy a theatre actor for me but the part of the manic-depressive Philippe V of Spain is tailor-made for him (quite literally as Ms. Van Kampen is his wife).  This is a character of great excess and Rylance plays it to the hilt.  Farinelli, the castrato who Queen Isabella introduces into his life to soothe his madness, is portrayed by the actor Sam Crane as well as two countertenors (there are no longer any castrati for obvious reasons), Iestyn Davies and James Hall.  The conceit works to perfection.  As the singer(s) Farinelli sings his gorgeous arias he is shadowed by the actor dressed as his twin.  Melody Grove as Isabella is the queen who loves her husband beyond imagination but is as seduced by Farinelli's voice as he is.  I last saw her as the title character in the "The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart" at the McKittrick Hotel where she masterfully held the stage. The production design is exquisite and the lighting draws us into the period.  I read somewhere that the production is lit exclusively by candlelight.  I don't know if this is true but have no reason to doubt it.

"The Children" directed by James Macdonald at the the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre is another British import. Lucy Kirkwood's post-apocalyptic play set in a cottage on Britain's east coast in the aftermath of nuclear disaster has already garnered her awards, most recently the U.K. Writer's Guild Award for Best Play.  The play which stars Ron Cook, Francesca Annis and Deborah Finley debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016.  A couple, retired nuclear physicists played by Ron Cook and Deborah Finley are visited by a friend, Francesca Annis also a nuclear physicist, who they haven't seen in years.  As the play unfolds we begin to suspect the reason for her visit. No spoilers here but it's not a happy one.  The acting is what lifts the play above the material (which is good but perhaps overpraised).  I was especially pleased to see Deborah Findlay in another meaty role, having recently had the great fortune to see her in Caryl Churchill's "Escaped Alone" at BAM,  another play with a post-apocalyptic bent.

Best and Worst of 2017

There was so much good theatre this past year if you were lucky enough to catch any of it. Below are my top 10 in no particular order:

Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" at The Park Avenue Armory with Bobby Cannavale
Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"  by PTP/NYC at the Atlantic Theatre
Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" on Broadway with Jake Gullenhaal and         Annaleigh Ashford
Bill T. Jones "A Letter to My Nephew" at BAM Harvey
Duncan MacMillan's "People, Places, Things" at St. Ann's Warehouse with Denise Gough
Jen Silverman's "The Moors" at The Playwright's Realm
Rachel Bonds' "Sundown, Yellow Moon" at Ars Nova
J.T. Rogers "Oslo" at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center
Lucas Hnath's "A Doll's House Part 2" on Broadway with Chris Cooper and Laurie Metcalf
Heather Christian's "Animal Wisdom" at The Bushwick Starr

Honorable Mentions:

The Encore production of Lerner and Loewe's "Brigadoon" at City Center with Kelli O'Hara
Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM Harvey
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch's "Cafe Muller and Right of Spring" at BAM Opera
Shakespeare in the Park's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"at the Delacorte with Annaleigh Ashford
Amy Herzog's "Mary Jane" at NYTW
Martin Zimmerman's "On the Exhale" at The Roundabout with Marin Ireland
Robert Lepage's "887" at BAM Harvey
David Harrower's "Knives in Hens" at 59E59
Gare St. Lazar Ireland's "The Beckett Trilogy" at Lincoln Center White Light Festival with Conor   Lovett
Manual Cinema's "Mementos Mori" at BAM Fisher.

I saw many, many more performances that I enjoyed in 2017 but I'm sticking to naming only the best of the best, although perhaps an extra honorable mention to Richard Nelson's "Illyria" at The Public Theatre is necessary.

My favorite emerging theatre companies at the moment are The Playwright's Realm, The Bushwick Starr and Ars Nova although they have had their share of misfires.  Last year I would have included Soho Rep but I was really put off by several recent productions and readings.

Unfortunately, some of the WORST theatre ever also happened in 2017.  Here are a few for your consideration:

Theatre de la Ville, Paris's production of Albert Camus's "State of Siege" at BAM Opera
Ayad Akhtar's "Junk" at  the Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center
Richard Maxwell's "Samara" at Soho Rep
Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen's "The Light Years" at Playwright's Horizons
Geoff Sobelle's "The Object Lesson" at NYTW
Lynn Nottage's "Sweat" on Broadway
Matthew Aucoin's "Crossing" at BAM Opera
Michael Yates' "The Rape of the Sabine Women by Grace P. Matthias" at the Playwright's Realm
Dominique Morriseau's "Pipeline" at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center
Bryna Turner's "Bull in a China Shop" at the Claire Tow Theatre at Lincoln Center