Plays in NYC

NYC is a town for seeing plays.  A LOT of plays.  And we have seen our fair share since arriving 7 months ago.   

The plays staged in New York run the gamut from the classics to the avant garde.  Our tastes tend toward the middle of the spectrum, since we prefer a good story well told.  The traditional works, unless they are adapted, tend to lack the pace and innovation that modern theater brings.  The avant garde works are sometimes so obscure that they defy understanding. 

Not far from our building on East 59th Street is the off-broadway 59E59 Theaters.  So far, we have seen four plays there and all were good and some were very good.  The most recent play we attended was Ideation, a play by Aaron Loeb about four management consultants with overactive imaginations fueled by extreme paranoia.  The subject of the consulting assignment is as serious as can be (no spoilers here).  Once the consultants start applying their intelligence and their analytical tools to the problem, the conference room setting transforms into a lunatic asylum.

A teaser for the play sets the scene:  "Aaron Loeb brings a dark comic edge to this psychological suspense thriller, in which a group of corporate consultants work together on a mysterious and ethically ambiguous project. As the lines between right and wrong are blurred, these characters must navigate the cognitive dissonances and moral dilemmas to decide for themselves if everything is as it really seems."  (Query:  Do consultants ever worry about ethical ambiguity?)

We enjoyed the play and especially recommend it to consultants, conspiracy theorists and germaphobes.

Another theater we discovered recently is in the East Village in Alphabet City.  The Metropolitan Playhouse,m located near the Lower East Side, is committed to plays about the Lower East Side, both its history and life today.  The theater is off-off-broadway and quite small (photo below).  Of course, size does not really matter when it comes to theater.  The four one-act plays we recently saw prove that point.  From the draft riots in 1863 to activist women in the early 20th century to a spiritual tale to a hilarious, poignant story of warring neighbors, life in the Lower East Side is vividly portrayed. 

The stage of the Metropolitan Playhouse located in the Cornelia Connelly Center on East 4th, NYC.

Other plays we recommend include:

• H2O, "Jane Martin"
• The Royale, Marco Ramirez
• Sylvia, A.R. Gurney
• I and You, Lauren Gunderson
• The Humans, Stephen Karam
• A Class Act, Norman Shabel

On the do not even think about it list are:

• China Doll, David Mamet (We don't care that Mamet wrote it and Al Pacino acted in it, it was still atrocious.)
• Wide Awake Hearts, Brendan Gall (A self-indulgent, sleep-inducing play reworking overworked plot lines . . . badly.  What gall the playwright had.)   

H2O, by "Jane Martin"

The Royale, by Marco Ramirez

Sylvia, by. A.R. Gurney

I and You, by Lauren Gunderson

The Humans, by Stephen Karam

 

A Class Act:  A one-act showcase in an off-off-broadway theater near times Square, with strong writing, directing and acting.  The play tells the story of lawyers battling over a class action it has a lot more to say about the world we live in.