I like seeing stars too, but only when they come with good acting as Rachel McAdams did with her impressive performance in last season’s Mary Jane. But, as anyone who has caught my podcasts Stagecraft and All the Drama can tell you, I’m most turned on by playwrights and so the shows I’m always most eager to see are those by smart writers who have interesting things to say about the ways in which we try to make sense of—and make connections in—this complicated world in which we all live.
So my spring preview is a little different from others I’ve been reading. I do want to see the shows that so many of my colleagues are touting but below are five that I’m really desperate to see:
LIBERATION by Bess Wohl @ Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, starting Jan. 31: One of the things I most admire about Wohl is her refusal to write the same kind of play twice. She’s written a romcom about young Nazi lovers, a musical about porn stars and a comedy about people at a silent retreat in which only a couple of lines of dialog are ever spoken. This time out she's given herself the challenge of looking at women’s attempts to figure out what they want for themselves in two separate time periods set 50 years apart and I can hardly wait to see what she makes of that.
GRANGEVILLE by Samuel D. Hunter @ Signature Theater, starting Feb. 4: There have recently been a slew of works—Blood Quilt, The Hills of California, even the excellent movie “His Three Daughters”—about siblings coming together to mourn a dying parent but it’s hard to find a more thoughtful or sensitive playwright working today than Hunter and so I’m really curious about what spin his play centered on two half-brothers played by Brendan Fraser and Brian J. Smith will bring to that theme.
PURPOSE by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in a Steppenwolf production @ the Helen Hayes Theater, starting Feb. 25: Although he’s been turning out one provocative work after another over the past 15 years, it was last season’s production of Appropriate that put Jacobs-Jenkins on many theatergoer’s radar. It featured a dysfunctional white southern family with some skeletons in their closet. This new work is switching the focus to an equally troubled midwestern black family who will be brought to life by such catnip performers as LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Henry Lennix, John Michael Hill and Kara Young.
WINE IN THE WILDERNESS by Alice Childress @ Classic Stage Company, starting March 6: Back in the 1950s and '60s, the theater world wasn’t quite ready for the nuanced ways that Childress insisted on portraying black people in plays like Trouble in Mind and The Wedding Band. But as the success of recent revivals of those works have shown, Childress, who died in 1994 at the age of 77, was a master storyteller and so I'm sure you'll understand why I'm over the moon about the fact that the actress and producer La Chanze is making her directorial debut with Childress' two hander about an artist and the model he believes will help him create his image of black womanhood.
FLOYD COLLINS music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Tina Landau @ Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starting March 27: It’s not just writers who create straight plays who draw me in. I’ve been waiting for years for a revival of Guettel’s musical which I missed during its brief 25-show run in 1996. Its story, based on the true 1925 incident of a cave explorer who set off a media circus when he got trapped underground, sounds intriguing; Landau, who is also directing, is a whiz at staging shows and the role of the explorer seems almost tailor-made for Jeremy Jordan who left The Great Gatsby to take the part. But it’s the chance to hear Guettel’s score live that has me chomping at the bit because as he’s shown with The Light in the Piazza and The Days of Wine and Roses, he knows how to play to both the minds and hearts of theatergoers like me.
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